Pleasant Puzzlements

The two art shows at Ventura College this month--the final exhibition of out-of-town artists this school year--beg as many questions as they answer. Each exhibition, in its own way, intermingles ambiguity with earthy delights, and therein lies the attraction. Bring your own meaning detector.

Gallery 2 is filled with the strangely elemental, nature-based works of sculptor John Austin Hylton of Fenton, Calif.

Hylton has a background in archeology and architecture, disciplines that relate directly to both the longing for the seemingly unfettered integrity of ancient cultures and a quest for formal order in his art.

We can see a clear comparison between his work and that of other current sculptors, such as the fanciful Nancy Graves and form-obsessed Martin Puryear, whose epic yet delicate new sculpture recently went up in a courtyard at the Getty Center.

Hylton explains that he is “attracted by the sense of ‘timeless beauty’ that attends the ruins and artifacts of early civilizations, as well as by the inherent sense of design and proportion that informs their remains.”

If the sculptures have rough edges and surfaces, they are also informed by a formal design attitude, with an aspiration toward graceful symmetries and balances.

Woven containers appear as a recurring motif throughout the show, but his use of basket-weaving extends beyond the realm of functional craft--just as basket-weaving in ancient cultures had an importance deeper than just its mundane utility.

In “Entropy Contained,” a hollowed-out tree trunk cradles a basket made from wax, twigs and twine, in a ragged metal enclosure--a serial container effect.

The basket motif reappears in the long piece “Imaginary Direction of Time/Avoiding the Singularity,” with its two sculpted, polished “branches” resting on stones on the floor and culminating in an offshoot of baskets-as-foliage.

Essentially, “Nebula” carries the idea one step further, with a large, nest-like construction of twigs suspended from the ceiling and containing hollowed-out gourds.

Here again, we find containers within containers, enfolded voids that also convey an embracing spirit.

It’s easy to romanticize bygone cultures, to gloss over less savory aspects and imagine a life less cluttered than our current data-choked era.

But Hylton’s art makes a viable and flexible link between his own personal, contemporary art expression and a perspective that takes in cultures of old, with a simultaneous bow to the prevailing power of nature.

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Over in the New Media Gallery, the Bloomington, Ill.-based Constance Estep Wells displays what, on first impression, looks to be a whimsical and pleasantly surreal aesthetic.

She shows paintings and etchings, with collage touches, portraying fragments of figures on sumptuous backgrounds, often flecked with gold leaf on gesso-treated wood.

In a statement, she writes of the collage technique as one useful to her own complex process, which entails “one layer of truth on top of another on top of another . . . it becomes difficult to decipher what the truth of the matter really is, or how many truths exist within a given situation.”

That sense of metaphorical gamesmanship is clearly in the air here, with plenty of margin for interpretation by individual viewers.

Often, as with “Sister Act” and “He’s Just a Jugglerman,” works draw on loose references to life in the circus, that handy metaphor for human folly and pleasure-seeking.

“Hanging” typifies the paradox in an oddly entrancing work. A cursory look finds a circus woman hanging by her teeth--nothing unusual there.

Next to her, though, is a horse, also hanging in the giddy atmosphere of a circus tent, but lacking a head. The image is enigmatic, slightly disturbing and unaccountably compelling.

DETAILS

John Austin Hylton, Mixed-Media Sculpture, and Constance Estep Wells, “House/Hold,” through March 31 at Ventura College, 4667 Telegraph Road in Ventura; call gallery for hours; 648-8974.