Packed with variety and energy, ‘Insights’ makes art look simple

MATTHEW OHM’S ‘UNTITLED’

Pity the folks tasked with installing “Insights 2008,” the Cal State Long Beach Art Department’s annual juried exhibition at University Art Museum (UAM). This show seems to grow every year.

When I visited, the installers were still hard at work atop fiberglass ladders, and everywhere were blue painters’ tape and notes showing what went where, what should be electrified, what wasn’t ready.

With some of the power off, it was a different show than you’ll see—more conventional in many respects without working video and mechanical installations, but still captivating.

Each piece came with its own installation instructions—and sometimes the artist to install it—but the UAM crew picked locations, and they did a good job. As it did last year, “Insights” opens with a blast of pop and color. This time it’s David Yendes’ light-hearted In the Back Room—a giant wooden Mickey Mouse seated on pallets, showing his inner framework, and grinning like a lizard.

It’s a perfect beginning, just as Kazimiera Reitz’s somber Untitled #2 is aptly placed inside the show. An enigmatic softground etching of a nude woman seated, her back showing the red flesh within, and overlaid with Korean calligraphy, this piece demands something of you.

You decide what, and what it all means. UAM periodically offers themed shows, but this is not one of them. This is once again a student art show with professional-grade art—and the kind of youthful exuberance that other museums in this town should be falling over themselves to possess.

That energy is everywhere; I managed to nearly trip over an installation of what resembled a hollow log with branches protruding. Nothing like a pratfall to make you appreciate standing and walking. If this year’s “Insight” has a fault, it’s the sheer number of works, and that irrepressible energy. It overwhelms, but fortunately, the more sedate pieces calm you down.

Susan Henry’s Landscape is soothing; made from sewn-up stripes of fabric, it’s more a quiltscape than a portrait of the land. Across the way is Matthew F. Ohm’s Untitled, one of the exhibition’s grandest statements. Ohm’s description reads like the materials list for the George W. Bush Presidential Library: “40 pieces of driftwood, cement, pages from history books.” Their curious forms and relationships are engrossing—like a giant canvas of bleached bones.

Then there’s Leland Paxton’s cheeky Woodpecker: a naked baby bird sculpture made from gum and chewing gum (he’s right, there is a difference) and resting, blind and vulnerable, on a pair of Hanes tighty-whities. Excellent!

Gum, driftwood, rebar—students in wood, fiber, metal and ceramics use every conceivable material. The metalworkers are having another strong year. Last year, their department sent retablos—exquisitely detailed miniature altars. This year, it’s little modern sculptures, and again they’re fabulous.

Alicia Minette, a senior, offers up an untitled work of bronze and copper, shaped like a tiny lightbulb. The detail’s amazing, as it is with Cheryl Lommatsch’s Fly Baby Fly, a tiny bisque baby doll encased in a silver thorax and wings. Lommatsch uses nickel silver here; once the stuff our faucets at home were made from, works like these only make it more exotic.

One last blast? Try ending with pop—Rick Reese’s sunny It’s a Cinch, a collage of koi, a vintage Cutty Sark label featuring the Cutty Sark, puppies—and a laconic line-drawn dude who looks like one of Barry McGee’s men.

Reese never says what’s a cinch; maybe it’s just this piece. Like so many of the other artists here, he makes it look easy.

INSIGHTS: 2008 UNIVERSITY ART MUSEUM | 1250 BELLFLOWER BLVD | LONG BEACH 90840 | 562.985.5761 | CSULB.EDU/ORG/UAM | OPEN TUES-SUN NOON-5PM | THURS NOON-8PM | $4 | OPENING RECEPTION THURS 6-8PM | THROUGH JUNE 1

Tags: cal state long beach, george w. bush, insights, Mickey Mouse, university art museum