Still Life With Verve

You’ve seen an example of Donna Clark’s handiwork around town of late, via her detailed depiction of stones on the poster for the Ventura Chamber Music Festival. Meanwhile, an exhibit of her work hangs in the showcase gallery of the Buenaventura Gallery with the focus on still life subjects, pleasantly off to the left of conventional.

Stones, with their iridescent color variations and veined intricacies of design, are a specialty, and some actual examples sit in the gallery alongside her portrayals.

Surfaces are king here, and it’s enough for Clark to savor the textures and reflectivity of pieces depicting the furl of fabric and the contours of ceramics.

Elsewhere, she takes on the challenge of rendering other objects in the everyday realm, approaching the exotic.

An old Speed Graphic camera is the subject, in an elliptically cropped composition, in the color pencil work “Eye on the World.”

Clark’s work evokes the hand-eye-mind coordination of an artist consciously seeking to capture both reality and her own expressive style.

Fittingly, “Self-Portrait” focuses on a series of items, such as shoes and a string of paper clips, with the artist’s own hand--the self-portrait element--clutching a pencil, the tool of the trade.

In other chamber festival-related art news, an “Invitational” show of work is hanging in a new venue with potential, the old Topping Room off to the side of the E.P. Foster Library in downtown Ventura. The work here is a grab bag, including Peggy Lindt’s hand-tinted photography and Kenneth Oku’s paintings, with intriguingly hazy surface effects that seem suitable for portraits of musicians in action. After all, music, in its essential form, is the polar opposite of still life.

The exhibition also includes several sculptures by Joanne Duby, the sole three-dimensional artist here.

She uses stone and metal in inventive ways that often allude to nature, in the sensuous depiction of flowers or the composite structure of “Earth Orb.” The show runs through the duration of the chamber music festival Sunday, but with luck, this space will host future art exhibitions.

DETAILS

Donna Clark, through May 22 at the Buenaventura Gallery, 700 E. Santa Clara St. in Ventura. Hours: 11 a.m.-4 p.m. Tuesday-Saturday; 648-1235.

“Visual Impressions,” through May 9 at the Topping Room, E.P. Foster Library, 651 E. Main St. in Ventura. Hours: Noon-6 p.m. Tuesday-Sunday.

Artwork Fringes: The recent ArtWalk in Ventura was another successful venture in bringing folks out to mill and gaze at art in downtown Ventura.

The most provocative event connected to the ArtWalk, though, was carried on in a literal fringe zone, up in the Third Floor Gallery of the City Hall. There, Jeff Kaiser’s hypnotic multimedia piece, “Ganz Andere,” was presented, screening numerous times over the course of a week and culminating the day of the ArtWalk.

This concrete-walled space, the site of the old women’s jail, is an enigmatic power spot in Ventura’s art scene and took on an added atmospheric edge for the occasion. The windows, normally affording the best panoramic view in town, were blacked out, giving the room a basement-like quality that contributed to a feeling of sensory disorientation.

For his latest creative concoction, Kaiser--a composer, conceptualist and trumpeter--created a mostly abstract musical soundtrack (available on CD) to which CalArts-based artist Clay Chaplin created a complementary video component.

Poet Phil Taggart contributed some of his characteristically pithy, punchy text to the whole, which is all about juxtaposition of sight and sound, basking in experimental verve.

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The components get along just fine. Just as Kaiser’s music crisscrosses between electronic and “real time” horn playing (including colorful work by noted L.A. jazz reed player Vinnie Golia), as well as veering in and out of rhythmic pulse, Chaplin’s imagery, on two large-screen video sources and two smaller televisions set up in the space, is alternately real and surreal.

He sometimes uses purely visual material, but also manipulates clips of military and police action and religious ceremonies.

Sometimes, the imagery relies on visual effects that suggest both Rorschach test-like split screens, kaleidoscopic scenes and stained-glass-window fragmentation. Distorted or deconstructed sound sources might be mated to visual corollaries in an audio-visual synthesis that evokes an agitated dream state.

With its abrasive moments and deposits of unfocused angst, “Ganz Andere” is not entirely a pretty picture, by standard definitions. But it’s a piece that stirs up emotions and sensations you can’t quite get a fix on, except to acknowledge that something strangely potent this way comes.