QuintGallery.com

Labeling art is sometimes a useful shorthand form of thinking. But it can also be a sign of flabby thought.

Take that well-worn term “conceptual art.” It has been applied to lots of different kinds of work in recent years, so much so that it becomes of less and less use.

Roman de Salvo’s inventive work is rich with ideas and idiosyncratic media, so this description has been applied to his work often, going back to the early 1990s. And yet the label fits uneasily with his art.

Consider this typical definition of it from Webster’s Dictionary: “an art in which the ideas of the artist are more important than the means used to express them.” Applying it to de Salvo’s art doesn’t quite work.

There is a generally a controlling idea. But he’s also a superb maker of things, whether his material is electrical conduit or whether it’s wood, as in his current exhibition at Quint Contemporary Art.

The works in this show — with its alliterative title, “Split, Splice, Splay, Display” — pick up where he left off with his large-scale permanent public work of 2006, “Nexus Eucalyptus,” installed on the site of the CalTrans District 11 headquarters in Old Town. The construction of the piece was a feat of engineering, in which he turned massive branches into a kind of seamless network resembling a roadway system.

Quint Contemporary Art has had several addresses in the past 30 years, but wherever it has been — downtown, Mission Hills, the Miramar area or La Jolla — the gallery has been a space you just had to visit. My history of seeing shows there spans 24 years; and from the first, I sensed that Mark Quint was the real thing, with his enormous passion for art and artists.

Happily, that intuition proved correct. But who knew that he was going to be able to sustain his space(s) for so long, in a town where collectors of serious contemporary art aren’t exactly plentiful?

It isn’t easy to pinpoint how he has accomplished this. But there are certain qualities that have worked in his favor: a keen eye for artists of vision and substance; the desire to stick with them; a curiosity about new artists; and a personality that appeals to museum professionals, collectors and, yes, critics, too. He was also willing to bring artists from afar for residencies (in partnership with Michael Krichman), which yielded a string of memorable shows.

Mark Quint, owner of La Jolla’s eponymous gallery, has showcased the work of contemporary artists for nearly three decades. On Aug. 15, Quint will present 75 pieces of that work by regional, national and international artists in “Three Decades of Contemporary Art” at The California Center for the Arts, Escondido Museum. The show will run through Dec. 31.

When the museum asked Quint to mount an exhibition featuring a selection of artists’ work that he has shown over the past 28 years, he had an ample list to choose from. But to build the exhibition, Quint had to borrow many pieces from Southern California museums and private collections. (At least half of the works belong to La Jolla collectors.)
“It is special for me to present the work of many of the artists that I’ve shown in one large space,” Quint said. “I haven’t seen a lot of this work in over 15 years.”

Many of the artists are from the San Diego region, and numerous pieces are large enough to require the spacious venue that the museum provides.

There is nothing conventional about the California Center for the Arts, Escondido, Museum presenting a show devoted to a San Diego gallery. But then, there’s nothing conventional about the gallery itself.

In 1981, Mark Quint opened the Quint Gallery in La Jolla to showcase his art and that of his friends. Soon, he focused on just the works of others. But instead of staying stagnant in a permanent space, he sought out places to adapt to the needs of the artist. His galleries soon became the rave of the contemporary art scene in San Diego, whether he showcased art in a large industrial building near the Miramar military base, in formal gallery or in a back alleyway in Hillcrest.

“The gallery has gone through several different permeations,” explained Quint. “We started slow with a more traditional gallery. Then it was a residency program. I’ve always enjoyed working with artists directly. If anything, that’s what my gallery is devoted to.”

Fifty seems like a reasonable number of artists for an exhibition meant to offer a mini-panorama of the San Diego art scene. It should be said that this show at Quint Contemporary Art is not a look at the wider regional scene that would encompass Tijuana; its title, “Homing In: An Exhibition of 50 San Diego Artists,” can be taken literally, for the most part.

One of the artists – and a very good one – does live in Tijuana: Iana Quesnell. But she emerged and went to grad school in San Diego, so the name of the exhibition doesn’t mislead much.

There’s a single work by each artist on view at Quint, and one might suspect that the show would be weighted toward the local ones that usually show there. You’d be correct in this line of thinking.

Nonetheless, Quint has long shown at least some of the best local artists, such as Jean Lowe, Kim MacConnel, Patricia Patterson and Jay Johnson. Happily, many of the picks from outside its stable in “Homing In” are also good ones.

It’s one of the centuries-old ideas about art that it can mirror the physical world, pleasurably, disturbingly or in other ways. And since its inception in the early 19th century, photography has long been a powerful medium in that respect. But photography, in the art arena, has strayed from this function regularly in the last three decades or so: Creating visual fictions is commonplace. Approaches are myriad and two distinctly different ones are in effect at Quint Contemporary Art in a pair of shows: “Making Space,” featuring Lee Materazzi’s pictures with performing models, and “Every Instance Removed,” Derek Stroup’s photographs that alter the designed landscape we take for granted.

Materazzi, an emerging photographer based in Miami and partly educated in London, makes loopy pictures with a symbolic undercurrent. You might say people are doing pretty dumb things in her pictures: making their heads disappear into the ground, a kitchen drawer or a picture on the wall. As much as we know that their heads haven’t truly evaporated into thin air, in most cases they look like they have. (No, she hasn’t Photoshopped them out of existence in the images; this is straightforward trickery.) So, aside from the smiles or chuckles Materazzi’s photographs may elicit, they play on the degree of willingness we have to delight in visual fantasy. Most are simply playful. And after seeing “Head in Grass” and “Head in Dirt,” you have to think there must be a “head-in-sand” print somewhere in her inventory. But a couple of other images convey a visual and emotional tension: “Head in Utensil Drawer,” with its sharp objects, and “Storage Container,” in which a person is crammed into a plastic canister in the bottom of a closet. There is an art historical pedigree to these pictures too, in dada, fluxus and conceptual art. But you don’t need to think about that to be amused by them. It’s hard to decide whether Materazzi is simply a clever artist or something more than that, based on this show. But I’m intrigued enough to want to see more of her work.