So long to so-so space
New, double-size home makes JayJay twice as nice
By Victoria Dalkey -- Bee Art Correspondent

Since it opened its doors three years ago in a storefront on Franklin Boulevard, JayJay has become the hottest gallery in town. Co-directors Beth Jones and Lynda Jolley have poured their energies into presenting fresh and innovative works by a group of artists who mostly work outside the mainstream of Sacramento's narrative, Funk and Bay Area Figurative traditions. JayJay's trendsetting approach has opened the doors for artists who take inspiration from current national and international sources rather than ones that date back to the 1960s.

This month's Second Saturday marked the grand opening of JayJay's new 2,000-square-foot space in a renovated building on Elvas Avenue that formerly housed Ogden Engineering Supply. Jones and her husband, Steve, a commercial interior designer, bought the building to accommodate the gallery as well as his business, DesignTech, and Beth Jones and Jolley's art consulting enterprise.

"We rebuilt the entire structure," says Beth Jones. "The only thing left of the old building is the walls, the cement floor, and the pillars that were made of trees that were 300 years old.

"The new space is a significant improvement over the old one," she adds. "The space has doubled in size. We have really big walls now so we can show large works, both paintings and sculpture, and the L-shaped gallery in back allows us to show more artists at one time."

In designing the building, Steve Jones, who specializes in architectural design, mixed a variety of styles.

"He wanted people to be able to see the skeleton of the building, so many of the structural elements are exposed," Beth Jones says, "and to show people what can be done with lighting and furniture."

With contemporary furniture, high-tech lighting, visible heating and air conditioning ducts overhead and cement floors buffed to a rich sheen, you might describe the space as a kind of retro industrial chic.

It's a perfect backdrop for JayJay's opening shows: a solo exhibition of Mark Emerson's large, eye-popping abstractions in the main room and "New New," a group show of small works by the gallery's stable of 16 artists in the back gallery.

Emerson, who had a solo show at the Crocker Art Museum last year, continues his exploration of vibrating fields of color made up of tiny squares and rectangles, inspired by op art and the landscape. The paintings function on several levels, changing as you move closer or farther away from them.

From a distance, they are cool, recessive fields of color that represent a kind of visual equilibrium of opposing forces. Up close, they are so active and complex that it is sometimes painful to look at them. Dazzled by the close-valued colors, the eye bounces around and finds no resting place. At mid-range, scintillating fields of color in geometric shapes appear.

"Three on a Match" is an atmospheric field, dominated by blues and blue-grays, with slightly diagonal stripes that fall down like rain. "Cistern" is a round painting that pulsates with color-generated light. As you move back, a diamond appears in the right sector of the painting, mysteriously asserting itself into your visual field.

The sombre gray and chocolaty tones of "Night in Tunisia," as rich and delicate as a Persian miniature, provides a moment of reflection before you are assaulted by "Straight No Chaser," a buzzingly hyperactive arrangement of stripes, diagonals and hexagonal forms that seem three-dimensional.

Smaller works include "Love for Sale," a bifurcated canvas that resembles tapestry or woven cloth, and "Major Domo: D.E.F.," an homage to Emerson's onetime mentor Darrel Forney, in which a jagged form hovers over a field of contending colors.

The overall tone of "New New" is also cool. The mood here is intellectual, introspective and, at times, almost icy.

The works range from the high modernism of Dean de Cocker's gelid wall piece of white and clear plates and Roger Berry's elegant looping form of Corten steel to postmodern works such as Roger Yogis' rebus-like "sign painting" and David Wetzl's meticulously crafted landscape of electronic circuitry and mystical images.

The show is dominated by abstract works, among them Joan Moment's paintings of circular forms that suggest molecular structures and Peter Stegall's small enamel of lyrical, lilting forms in subtle, saturated hues.

While John J. Smith and Tom Montieth address the landscape, they do so abstractly. Montieth gives us a haunting, psychologically fraught landscape of hulking forms and a fragile structure against a sulphurous sky. Smith's abstract view of a summer levee is full of sweet, ringing color and facile, painterly action.

Only two of the artists deal directly with the figure. S.R. Jones offers an evocative mixed-media piece with a female nude emerging from darkness into light, and Galelyn Williams presents an altered 19th century photo transformed into a wrenching image of a blind boy with his cane. The figure is implicit, however, in Jack Nielsen's marvelous granite-and-steel wall sculpture of a rocky ledge with an upended, falling chair.

With a strong group of artists on board and a spiffy new space, Jones and Jolley are looking forward to a long run.
"Hey," says Jolley. "We bought the building. We have to be here for at least 30 years."