Involuted Perspectives, in Process

As art exhibition and curatorial frameworks go, the current Santa Barbara Museum of Art show Inside/Outside casts an especially broad-based and inclusive net. The premise underscoring the collection of artworks by emerging artists of diverse backgrounds, media, and intentions relates to the innate act of artists to bring their interior states and impulses to dealing with the outside world.

Under such a widely embracing and vague curatorial umbrella, many are potentially called, and welcomed. The show, neatly arranged in the remodeled museum’s upstairs contemporary gallery (the Loeb Family Gallery) manages to be one of those seemingly modest sleepers among art worth seeking out in Santa Barbara at the moment.

The “inside looking out” theme is well-embedded in Narsiso Martinez’s “Mission-Precious Cargo,” a large piece painted on actual produce boxes. The mega-image of daily work-life in agriculture gains a protagonist’s vantage through the small inset portrait of a worker swaddled in a hat and protective bandana, plus headphones to supply his own interior world while on the jobsite.

A more abstracted and ulterior motive informs Rose Salane’s semi-assemblage construction “Nesting Tables.” Fanciful vintage nesting tables, an embroidered tablecloth, and a replica of ice skates conspire toward a narrative involving TSA and the paranoid aura of life amid the threat of terrorism.

Whatever the encoded meaning and cross-section of stimuli driving Ilana Savdie’s elegantly wild painting “Lágrima y mocos (exploiting a suitable host),” it is an engaging explosion of color and mutating forms vaguely suggesting figure fragments and hints of an inchoate host environment.

Whitney Bedford’s work strikes a familiar note for anyone who caught the intriguing recent New Landscapes, Part I show up at Santa Barbara City College’s Atkinson Gallery, where her epic-scaled “Veduta (Bonnard Mediterranean Morning) Triptych” consumed one wall of the gallery. Here, with the more compact “Veduta (Lacombe Red Pines),” she similarly colors outside the lines of standard landscape art, using layering and degrees of decorative filigree and realistic flora representation to spin expectations in multiple directions.

Adjacent to her work, Jane Dickson’s tall vertical painting “El Niño Motorcycle 2” broaches a neo-film noir-ish atmosphere. An ambiguously semi-sinister nocturnal view of a Los Angeles suburb — verticalized to include the signature sentries of two palm trees — the painting depicts a calm before some unforeseen calm: apart from the stormy potential of the “El Niño” weather/ocean conditions, a certain motorcyclist is seemingly rolling toward the home’s front door. Danger is afoot, but in a willfully suspended state.

Similarly, an air of peril is present, along with a taste of transitional liberation in Kon Trubkovich’s “Untitled” painting of a face on a television, distorted by dyspeptic horizontal hold and poor reception. Implied in the simple image by the Soviet-born artist is a grander suggestion of the period when the Soviet bloc was losing its iron grip, as the Berlin wall fell and other structures and strictures tumbled.

On friendly turf, at least at face value, comforting sentimentality greets the eye in the epic form of Keith Mayerson’s Kermit the Frog portrait “Someday we’ll find it, the Rainbow Connection, the lovers, the dreamers and me.” Kermit is seen on a bicycle escaping the frog-unfriendly domain of Florida for a presumably happier home in California, an emblem of grin-bearing optimism. For those of us of certain age sets and Sesame Street–wise sensibilities, the very title of the work and song deposits a cheery earworm, and a youthful sense of wonder and future-as-salvation spirit.

A darker implied irony arrives through the recognition of an adult reality’s barbs and landmines. Accessing the “rainbow connection” takes more effort now. Yet the song remains, just the same.

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‘Inside/Outside’ is on view at Santa Barbara Museum of Art through February 18, 2024. See sbma.net.