Ghirardi’s Work Powerful, Evasive

SAN DIEGO —  Born in 1979 of many “indecisive influences,” Gary David Ghirardi’s work has evolved in the past decade to a state of richly rewarding evasiveness.

Nothing is seen in full, nothing is spelled out, completed, defined. Fragments of images are submerged behind cracked glass or incised, imprinted and scraped into concrete and plaster panels. Like slowly eroding memories, Ghirardi’s images feel just beyond the realm of approachable space.

In the dozen free-standing and wall-mounted constructions now on view at the David Lewinson Gallery in Del Mar Plaza (1555 Camino del Mar, through March 16), this evasiveness is a virtue. Ghirardi’s savvy balance between giving and withholding, burying and unearthing, inspires in the viewer an archeologist’s attentiveness to subtle clues.

The work evokes as well the moral reflection and questioning of society that accompanies such searches, as surviving bits of an era are pieced together to represent the whole.

Ghirardi calls his pigmented slabs “culture icons.” Shaped like heraldic shields, altars or irregular tablets, they wear a skin of gracefully incised lines, imprinted patterns, scratches, patches, stray marks and more consciously controlled Expressionist hieroglyphics. Set beneath the surface, beneath fragments of cracked glass, are small collages composed of cartoons, advertisements and illustrations. These windows offer a shallow view to a preserved realm, where decades-old emblems of popular culture mingle in compressed space.

Both walls and windows in Ghirardi’s work are stamped and scarred with histories that beg release. Ghirardi, a local artist, has always dealt, at least implicitly, with the notions of time and memory in his concrete works, but now his submerged imagery and newly aged surfaces also probe the intersections between materiality, spirituality and religion.

Some of the works are explicitly shrine-like, while others contain religious images as elements in the cultural collage.

In “Feast of the Impoverished,” a large, predominantly green wall relief incised with a bulbous cross, Christ appears in an inset illustration surrounded by fragmented advertisements for cars, alcohol and paint. For a carefree , the inviting words of an ad, appear above Christ’s head. Religion, too, is supported by sales pitches, the juxtaposition asserts. As the holy is debased to the status of just another commodity, ordinary commodities are offered as keys to a better life.

In another work, Buddha appears as both a laughing cartoon character and a kitschy souvenir figurine.

Despite the solid, weighty presence of these works, their faded, chalky colors and abraded surfaces suggest impermanence and instability. That, too, is the message of many of Ghirardi’s images--spinning houses, a plummeting airplane, a nuclear missile.

One of the most consistently evocative artists in San Diego, Ghirardi once again has succeeded in giving innovative form to some of the most enduring questions of time, culture, value and meaning.

Relevant, yes. Resonant, no.

Ellen Phillips, a local sculptor who has made notable contributions to temporary public art exhibitions in recent years, has turned a life-and-death dialogue about the environment into so much white noise in her current gallery show at MiraCosta College.

The show, “Hanging,” appears at first glance to be clumsy and ill-conceived and only grows more so with further study. Nine large garbage bags hang from the gallery ceiling, each one suspended over its own bed of pungent asphalt. The bags overflow with shredded car tires, and the asphalt beds host shards of glass and barbed wire, but the message of environmental crisis doesn’t emerge from there. It comes from the barrage of literature that Phillips has unceremoniously pinned to the gallery walls. Here, newspaper clippings, scientific studies and excerpts from journals spew the most urgent of news in the most tedious of ways.

Phillips states her concerns most effectively in the small “messages” she hangs from plastic bags around the gallery.

Inside each bag, an index card contains a statement about an environmental problem, and Phillips poses questions to the card’s holder: What can you do to help ease the water shortage? What costs would you be willing to pay to get rid of smog? What happens when we run out of landfill space or when radioactive waste begins leaking into the ocean?

Phillips slips a pencil and a few extra cards in each bag in the hope that viewers will respond. This is the transformation--from passive observer to enlightened activist--that “Hanging” aspires to effect in the viewer, but can hardly hope to achieve with such oppressively boring means.

The show, at MiraCosta’s Kruglak Gallery (One Barnard Drive, Oceanside) will continue through Feb. 26.