Art times two

Upfront Gallery

There’s more to a metallic sphere than meets the eye.

Suspended from the ceiling in what appears to be nautical netting, a row of blinking industrial orbs draws the viewer into the kind of thoughtful contemplation that can only lead to the concept of dichotomy. Especially if you’re perusing said orbs/buoys with their creator, Matthew Furmanski.

Blink, a solo exhibit and installation by Furmanski that is on exhibit at Ventura’s Upfront Gallery through April 7, is many, many things. One of those things is a visual manifestation of the semi-organic merging of industrial objects and the natural world that they, like everything else, are necessarily part of.

“With almost all my work, I like the intellectual or conceptual component to be as compelling as the visual component,” said Furmanski, who added that, while all of his work is loaded with meaning, he prefers that viewers attach their own meanings, meanings which can change from day to day and viewing to viewing. (Furmanski happens to be both assistant professor of sculpture at California State University, Channel Islands, and vice-chair of Ventura’s Public Art Commission).

“I don’t want someone to come in thinking that they get it or don’t get it,” he said. “I want it to be an exploration.”

Furmanski’s work combines the industrial and the natural, which is an element of the exhibit that can appear more implied than blatantly obvious. Furmanski beautifully combines the two elements in a series of photos in which he launched a buoy-like orb, complete with blinking light, into the ocean at night and photographed the path the orb’s light took using long exposures. The result is a series of nighttime shots imbued with ephemeral beauty.

The end product of Furmanski’s work is a manifestation of the concept that science and art can engage in visual dialogues of utter beauty — but again, the message is in the eye of the beholder.

“With a lot of the work that I do, a component of it is very precise, and takes a lot of planning and measuring and math,” Furmanski said. “What comes after is the intuitive part.”

Seabreeze Art Gallery

Todd Bertola has committed art and painted murders — and he can’t take it back now.

And so it is that in art, as in life, there are few do-overs. But in the case of artists Todd Bertola and Mia Bortolussi, who’d want one?

The pair, both members of the Seabreeze Art Gallery, recently showcased Silhouettes: Paintings & Photograms, a complementary collection of sharp-edged art imbued with plenty of intelligence and a chilling, clever vibe. Though the show closed March 31, the work by both artists can still be viewed at Seabreeze.

For Silhouettes, the pair were after a macabre flavor that was “not Freddy Krueger-ish, but Hitchcockian,” said Bertola. For his end of the show, Bertola created a series of paintings that dabble in different textures and contrast, such as glazes and matte finishes, though all are rendered in black, white and red. “A lot of it was an experiment, pushing the edges, pushing the envelope,” he said.

Originally, Bertola planned to paint “iconistic” objects that mirrored Bortolussi’s contribution of medical objects exposed on photo paper and represented as sharp, white images against black backgrounds. Instead, playing with the fact that a group of crows is called a murder — as a group of wolves is called a pack — Bertola created images of the birds that are as majestic as they are silently menacing. The result of the marriage between the two is a representation of the coldly clinical and surprisingly simple, paired with subjects of ominous passion. It is the viewer’s interpretation of the items and the birds that informs the meaning of the show as much as the art itself.

In paintings such as “Murder,” “Murder II,” “No Accomplice” and “Court,” the birds appear to be taking flight in a demonic flurry, passing judgment in intelligent silence and conspiring with other birds. In the paintings, all of the birds are black and the backgrounds are a deep, saturated red.

The show’s only human figure appears in, “I Committed Art,” a large, rectangular silhouette of a man whose murder weapon is a paintbrush dipped in red paint. Wearing a top hat and cape, the man is both menacing — like Jack the Ripper — and humorously clever, because of his chosen weapon. To his side, a canvas within the canvas has been violently sliced open. It is a captivating piece that blends the ominous and the intelligently funny.

Blink can be seen at Upfront Gallery, 267 S. Laurel St, Ventura, through April 7. Call 340-1448 or visit www.upfrontgallery.org. For information about Seabreeze