In This Art Space, Size and Duration Matter

Generous and reliably annual call-for-artists invitations are few and far between in the region. For various reasons, well-meaning projects and gallery outreaches tend to have fickle shelf lives. And none, certainly, have had the steady-pulsed longevity of the Small Images show, celebrating its 39th (count ‘em) anniversary at SBCC’s Atkinson Gallery this month.

One inherent balancing act for these exhibitions’ various curators through the years has been to land on a happy medium in terms of artwork population in a given show. This year’s model is judiciously parsed out by Santa Barbara Museum of Art Contemporary Art Curator James Glisson and UCSB’s AD&A Museum Curator Silvia Perea. The works are plentiful and diversified in medium and meaning, but they are also strategically arranged to allow for visual breathing room in the gallery.

In the obligatory rapid glance-through in the gallery, locals of a certain age (or cuisine inclination) may quickly zero in on a painting that deserves the unofficial Best Local Color image recognition — David Dixon’s painting “Lunch on Milpas.” More specifically, the image pays a due homage to a legendary eatery at Milpas and Alphonse Streets: La Super-Rica, itself now up to 44 years of service and international allure.

While Dixon’s painting serves as more of a tidily rendered documentary artwork, other award winners in the room veer in more poetic directions. The “Best of Show” nod goes to Stephanie Hubbard’s “Daydream,” a suitably titled collage work, admirably subtle and with blurred palimpsests of recognizable forms and references beneath the haze of dream vision. Placing second in the ribbon-worthy category is another ambiguous yet alluring piece with a telling title, RT Livingston’s “Identity Crisis: Blindspot.” This enigmatic drawing evokes fragmented memories of a face and a thumbprint serving as identity signifier.

Woven into the mix of small images this year are local artists whose work has appeared on various walls and shows for years. The list includes Nell Campbell’s evocative horizontal photograph “On the Malecón, Havana,” from her Cuban series; Bay Hallowell’s liquidus formal dance of her monoprint “Jumble Tumble”; and Pamela Bengham’s affecting and rough-hewn seascape painting “At the Edge of the Horizon.”

Also in the repeat visitor corner are the ever-inviting connector of objects and images found and otherwise, Dug Uyesaka; Colleen M. Kelly’s slyly subversive feminist commentary “Diminishing Women”; and Cynthia Martin’s eco-driven “VITAL SIGNS: Time of Reckoning,” juxtaposing stacked color bands and waveforms — natural and otherwise — traipsing across a black background. Across the room, local fave Nina Warner demonstrates her minimalist moxie with “Yellow Rose,” the simple, tranquil floral study, with a lone protagonist, on black.

Other small wonders grab at the wandering eye here, including the art-about-art-about-cosmetic-culture painting “Get a Facial Today,” by Jeanne Dentzel, and Megan Koth’s “Pearl Extraction,” suggesting sensuality and skin/membranous cross-references. In other words: sex, or sex-adjacent impressions.

Another award winner, among the several small but impressive sculptural works on the Atkinson Gallery floor, is Carolina Danu’s “Bloom,” a gathering of plant-like pieces created in the hardened and glistening medium of stoneware, yet evoking the life of cacti. The neighbor of “Bloom” on the floor lets loose with a certain elegantly outfitted F-bomb: Pamela Regan’s winkingly named “What’s Your Favorite Swear Word?” We now know hers.

Elsewhere in the sculpture zone, Paulo Lima’s mixed-media piece “Sankofu in Gear” cleverly combines the integrated hybrid imagery of gearworks and an African woman festooning curls for a coif. Something chilling settles in with Lisa Howard’s deceptively innocent found-object piece consisting of a charming ceramic dog and a plastic soldier with an arm and head missing. Its title: “Yeah, But Part of Me Didn’t Come Home (from Vietnam).”Howard’s piece is an example of art well-suited to the “small images” qualifier in question here, but also the unexpected power and pained emotionality of artistic concepts, even sometimes with the simplest (and smallest) of materials.

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Small Images is on view at SBCC’s Atkinson Gallery (Humanities Bldg., Rm. 202, SBCC East Campus, 721 Cliff Dr.) through April 6. See gallery.sbcc.edu for details.