Fallbrook Art Center

The North County Times 

September 28, 2010 - There's a new art exhibit on display at the Fallbrook Art Center and, according to a sign on the center's door, "viewer discretion is advised."

The display, called "Extreme Art," includes avant-garde sculptures and more accessible watercolors, but every piece has at least one thing in common ---- a plaque on which each artist explains how his or her piece is extreme.

Some pieces are more obviously extreme than others, but each offers a unique contribution to an overall exploration of the ways in which artists push limits and test boundaries.

"I could have filled a show with art that's all very avant-garde, but I really always like to do shows about contrast," the center's executive director, Mary Perhacs said. "It's also more accessible to people."

At least one artist appeared to be making fun of "inaccessible" art by taking avant-garde to its limits.

Larry Miller's "Asteroid" is made from a beach ball, resin and 52 pieces of electronic or mechanical junk, including a motion-activated surveillance camera.

"It has no meaning, it is not beautiful, it is built from junk, and required no artistic training to construct," Miller wrote in his description of the piece.

Another piece is literally made from trash.

"A Local Landscape" looked like a giant wind chime made of hanging pieces of trash, including an egg carton and a hubcap. More trash is scattered around it on the ground.

Fallbrook artist Jim Helms' description explained that he gathered the trash from roadsides. He hung the items where they can move in the breeze, to cause viewers to imagine how the trash "got away" and ended up in California's landscape.

Certainly one can imagine how a plastic bottle might have escaped a truck bed, but imagining how a child's single, gold Dora the Explorer sandal ended up on a roadside is a little more challenging.

A life-sized bull made of shoes could be considered extreme art for several reasons, but artist Joey Chavez described the challenge of making it as its most intense aspect.

"The work is extreme because of the commitment," he wrote. It took two or three months to gather the shoes and wire them into a bull shape. He cut his hands on the wire repeatedly, and the foot smell grossed him out the whole time.

Some pieces like San Marcos artist Jim Leahy's "Come Play with Us" are extremely unsettling.

His painting of three deranged and evil-looking babies is just downright creepy by most standards. One of the babies appears to have a bloody mouth.

"It deals with the nightmarish thoughts of morbid little dolls coming to life and yourself not knowing what their definition of playing with them entails," he wrote in the work's description.

A visitor could be forgiven for feeling a little unsettled on the way out of the exhibit. Anyone feeling the need to breathe into a paper bag is in luck. There are bags on hand in the lobby at artist Michael Maas' "breathing station."

There, visitors can pick up a small brown paper bag, breathe into it, tie the air in with the twine provided, label the bag and add it to the display.

One of the bags hanging from a long piece of twine said "Republican Blow Hard." There was a bag labeled "Exhaled sin" and an empty bag that said simply "I HATE ART."

Call staff writer Morgan Cook at 760-740-3516.

"Extreme Art"

-- Open daily until Oct. 25 at Fallbrook Art Center, 103 S. Main Ave.

-- Hours: 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Monday through Saturday; noon to 3 p.m. Sunday

-- Cost: $5

-- Admission: Free for members, active military personnel and children younger than 18.