Untitled Document

Dick and Jane were fading by the 1960s and gone by the 1970s. But in their heyday, the 1950s and the beginning of the 1960s, they reigned supreme as the archetypes of suburban boyhood and girlhood in America for primary school readers.

You can't help but think of them while viewing the exhibition “Domestic Deviation: New Works by Ernest Silva and May-Ling Martinez,” the third in the series of exhibitions dedicated to artists who have been awarded the San Diego Art Prize. The more direct line of allusion from Dick and Jane is to Martinez's collages, but Silva's paintings also refer to an earlier, idealized sort of American life.

Martinez, too young (at 34) to have ever encountered the pair in primary school readers, conjures up a world borrowed and constructed from 1950s era illustrations. But this world isn't a well-ordered suburban one.

People seem to have unusual powers. In “Knowledge,” a girl sends out a ray of wallpaper pattern that directs your eye toward the image of a happy family framed by sequins. In “Process of Thought,” a dotted line connects two heads in profile, staring at one another.

Every one of her meticulously well-made collages is a kind of landscape, but not a mirror of the natural world. One of the most arresting of the large-scale works is “Underneath,” in which a girl stares at a now quaint-looking machine while a boy on a swing dangles upside-down as if in some netherworld hidden from her.

The title of the show suits Martinez's art, since as surreal and unsettling as her pictures are, they have a homey aura too. This carries over to her sculptures too, made from fabric and cake molds and collectively called “Deep Holes.” There is indeed a hole in the middle of each, but the titles refer as much to the mystery added by auditory effects. A switch is provided on each and activates sounds, seemingly domestic. The combination of object and noise creates just the right balance between banality and mystery.

Watery world

Silva's art has some thematic parallels to Martinez's and this isn't by chance. He is one of three “established artists” to receive the San Diego Art Prize in its inaugural year. And in turn, each of these artists chose an emerging artist to exhibit concurrently.

Allusions to home and family recur in Silva's recent paintings, which are rendered in the fluid, seductive style that has come to characterize his images during the past three decades. People are distinctly rendered phantoms or archetypes. His landscapes are just as gracefully defined and just as unreal looking. Colors, usually limited to two or three, heighten this unreality.

The palette consists of various blues, white and black in “Vigilance, To the Rescue, Full Moon,” two women guide a canoe between trees, in which a soldier with a rifle stands to their left and a woman perches in a tree to their right. Red is dominant in “Campfire,” in which a mother and son warm themselves by the flames in the middle of a forest in which an Indian and frontiersman face off on either side of them, seemingly oblivious of the pair.

Silva often blurs the line between sky and earth. In fact, much of the time there is no solid ground at all. People look as if they are inhabiting ground that may be water. The lone deer in “Deer, Falls, House” is half submerged, though the house sits on the surface.

Silva has called himself a visual storyteller and likened the people as well as the animals in his pictures to characters in an “episodic drama.” Their continuing existence in many images, including these, looks precarious. He hints that women in the canoe will navigate their way through the trees and the woman and boy in “Campfire” (seen again in the more ominous “Fire and Trees, Woman and Boy”) will elude perils. Then again, others may reach different conclusions about these enticing, open-ended images.