Family Ties Serve as Framework for Show

There’s an atypical family gathering going on this month at the Orlando Gallery in Sherman Oaks, as Orange County-based Clarinel Stamos shows work alongside her daughter, Stephanie, in a two-person exhibit called “Familial.”

Without really trying, the viewer is inclined to look for clues of artistic lineage from one generation to the next. But, whatever the bloodline connection, the duo’s aesthetics veer toward separate corners.

Clarinel, the mother, is at once more mature in her work and also a bit freer, willing to experiment and literally deconstruct her work in search of new ideas.

Several of her pieces here are assemblages created from cut-up pieces of canvases and snippets of art pieced together and put into plexiglass boxes. It’s as if she wants to offer a glimpse into the artistic processes of invention and revision.

“Trio Thoughts” is essentially a painting recycled, with several layers of canvas on a common frame, slashed and peeled away to reveal a nude study. Transformation is the operative word here, in that the material itself has gone through a catharsis.

Clarinel’s landscapes are both local and mystical enough to lead the viewer’s thoughts beyond the specific topography of L.A.

“California Reality” finds a saintly woman in white strolling through the ruins of post-inferno Malibu, as if in a waking dream. In “Close to Home,” a close-up of a seashell lies on a pink blanket against an idyllic sea and a pink twilight sky beyond. It’s too good to be true, or is it?

While Stephanie’s mother is risk taking, Stamos the Younger certainly doesn’t adopt a straightforward approach to image-making either. She has studied art and psychology, and practices both, and her paintings appear as abstract portraits, which double as investigations of complex personalities.

To achieve this, she conjures up abstract imagery with fragments of faces peering through the visual maelstroms, looking for a way out, or a way in. Her “Card Series” are busy compositions, full of noisy abstract brushwork. Playing cards and bits of faces amid the abstract squall imply the uncertainty of fate.

Sometimes Stephanie glops on excess paint and foreign objects to create rough, tactile surfaces. “Beer Bottle” is an especially volatile piece, with scraps and bottle shards protruding from the canvas, along with a CD by Milli Vanilli,that symbol of artistic fakery and moral bankruptcy. The face amid all this debris conveys the sickly expression of the morning after.

The closest thing to a straight portrait is “Child,” but even here, the child’s face is aswirl in unexplained, overlaid imagery. Is it flames or foliage? The ambiguity is the point.

* “Familial,” art by Clarinel and Stephanie Stamos, through Jan. 31 at Orlando Gallery, 14553 Ventura Blvd., in Sherman Oaks. Gallery hours: 10 a.m.-4 p.m., Tuesday-Saturday; (818) 789-6012.

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Of Land and Lambs: The Artspace Gallery in Woodland Hills seems to be in a state of protracted limbo these days, scattered as it is in an office complex undergoing construction.

But, regardless of the state of the actual venue, the presence of art in this commercial neck of the woods is a desirable one, a kind of necessary cultural pulse.

At present, two painters’ works, which have no particular curatorial connection, are being shown. It’s hard to find the center in this exhibition, either as a logical presentation of two different artists, or as cogent displays of each artist’s work. Still, there are little charms along the way.

Bina shows a number of nicely rendered scenes of bucolic splendor, including the psychedelic blue of her “Fields of Bluebonnets.” But the most curious and intriguing of her works are a series of sheep paintings. Sheep are celebrated as animals in all their fleecy glory, often in the purple skies of dusk. But clearly the artist is conferring a symbolic, biblical importance to these bleating grazers.

Rosemary Hale brings a diverse, intuitive approach to her flora and landscape subjects, sometimes with a love of color and form that nods in the direction of Matisse, and sometimes with a folksy crudity. “Bosnia,” for instance, depicts an innocuous village scene in the simplest of visual terms, like the unfinished vision of a happy memory or a wishful dream.

* Rosemary Hale and Bina, through Jan. 31 at Artspace Gallery, 21800 Oxnard St., Woodland Hills. Gallery hours: 12-5, Tuesday-Friday, 12-4, Saturday; (818) 716-2786.