Mixed Up Highlight Talents of Tri-County Artists

All evidence points to — and reminds us of — the fact that Santa Barbara and the broader region is one especially enriched with art and artists. Reasons for the fertile artistic climate here may include quality of life and environment, community cultural focus, and possibly a creativity-conducive mineral in the water.

Too rarely do we get a wide overview of gallery representation of this local art phenomenon — one such valuable selective survey lands at the Westmont Ridley-Tree Museum of Art, in the form of the Tri-County Juried Exhibition, with the current show bearing the title Mixed Up. The exhibition is a coveted occasion and part of the annual art calendar, for artists and viewers. This year, there were 350 submissions, out of which 50 works were chosen, sometimes with two works by a single artist.

The selections rest in the hands of the carefully chosen juror, wisely from outside the area looking in. This year’s juror is Bay Area artist, author, and illustrator Rae Dunn (whose own bright-spirited art and commercial designs can be viewed downstairs in the museum).

As usually happens, the survey exhibitions tend to give a wide berth to stylistic varieties of expression, from artist to artist, giving credence to the moniker Mixed Up — but mixed up in a healthy, diversity-supportive way. Even so, the Dunn-picked sampling, while varied, leans generously in the direction of figurative and conventional paintings, compared to more abstract-oriented art in past years.

Among the notable and more traditional oil-on-canvas works on view are David Dixon’s idle, seasonal “Summer Evening in Savannah”; Nina Warner’s dreamy aerial, vapor-trailed nature paean with the punning title “Plane Air”; and Bruce Berlow’s “Peanut Toasty Roasty” luring us into its miniaturist circus sensibility. Veteran local artist Ruth Ellen Hoag appears more than once, with her cryptic “Heads of Stone” — a rogue-ish collection of Fauve-y faces — jumping out for special attention.

The abstract painting contingent is represented nicely, tucked into an alcove in the museum’s main gallery, in the form of Jo Merit’s elegant, tall, post-color field study “How Long Have I Been Sleeping.” Stacked planes of textured colors interact with warm spectral harmony.

In the museum’s entryway, Caroline Kapp’s elemental “Terminal Basins No. 1,” the Best of Show choice, is a toned cyanotype with an art-articulated nature theme: A striped stone serves as protagonist in a composition on a sand-colored grid background divided into nine squares. Other left-of-predictable, pocket-sculptural concepts in the entryway include Colleen M. Kelly’s “Dichotomy of Laundry” — with hangered “laundry” doubling as faux antique scroll and the curiously appealing stuff of Aiyana Cazabat’s series of tiny, spiky plastic bits, suddenly evoking a march of robotic cast-off insects.

A familiar and distinctive artist from the local scene, Ralph Corners, shows “Don’t Know 1,” with its intermeshed (mixed up, you could say) tableaux of cartoony surreal scenarios spread across two panels.

Another artist who has thankfully gone public in local galleries, in sundry group show settings, and at Sullivan Goss, is Tom Pazderka, whose piece “The Hike” (ash, oil, and charcoal on burned panel) takes its source from a vintage black-and-white photograph but distorted through the filter of his painterly eye. There are echoes of Gerhard

Richter’s painted photographybut with this artist’s personal spin. The internal jury is not in yet, but Pazderka’s painting may be this observer’s Best of Show choice.

Comic relief is allowed within the serious art business at hand in the show. In Sue Janossy’s dog portrait “Please… Please…,” what should fall under the category of too-cute-for-comfort kitsch invites a cozy chuckle, especially for the dog people among us. Cody Cammbell’s “Is it Love?” imagines a trans-tech love affair between two phones — one old-school landline style and one an early “smart” model — lounging in bed, naked. At least, vis-à-vis the clever anthropomorphicswitch-up, they seem naked.

Taking in this year’s selective Tri-County overview, the summary impression is that while “mixed up” is a proper qualifier, the exhibition is distinguished by qualities of impressive individual artistic focus in the house. And in the region.

Mixed Up is on view at the Westmont Ridley-Tree Museum of Art through June 17. See westmont.edu/mixedup.