By Margaret Regan LOCAL 803, A contemporary art gallery slightly off the beaten art track (it's in a residential neighborhood just west and north of the University) is exhibiting the disparate works of three artists whose vision is correspondingly off-kilter. The large show of painting, photography and sculpture the three have put together includes, just for instance, a life-size metallic octopus dangling its tentacles all over a metallic reincarnation of an old school desk. Black-and-white photos of suburban and rural scenes are punctuated by disquieting portents of disaster. Heated-up paintings in flaming orange and red feature such weird floating elements as human legs and heads. Timothy Cleary, the creator of the metallic octopus, has generated perhaps the oddest, and most intriguing, works in the show. A third-year MFA student at the University of Arizona, Cleary has crafted a menagerie of life-size metal animals, all of them incorporated into re-creations of objects meant for humans. "Maraba in the Crib," a bronze, steel and wood piece, has a life-size metal stork contentedly grooming itself; it's peacefully at home inside a rusted baby crib. A nearby palanquin (a Chinese-style litter, meant to be carried aloft by two laborers) seems intended to give the stork the royal treatment. Called simply "Palanquin," the seat is an elaborate cage, conveniently outfitted with comfy straw inside and decorated outside by lovely stork woodcuts of Cleary's making. Whether Cleary is intent on creating a surreal homage to fertility in these strange stork pieces, I can't say, but like all seven of the works he's exhibiting they demonstrate a formidable skill with his materials. Challenging the conventional notion of sculpture as a thing of beauty, all his pieces seem conceived by an off-center wit. Take "Gazehound Tea Service." This playful, bizarre work has converted a life-size bronze hound dog, possibly meant to be dead, into a tea kettle. The doggy kettle is elegantly laid out on a maple tabletop, surrounded by a set of additional lids. Angus Chassels Jr. is the young photographer responsible for the unsettling vision of suburbia. A recent graduate of Bard College, Chassels tackles the disquiet that's twin to domestic tranquillity. "Your Problem" captures the conventional Northeastern suburban tract house: wood siding, lush lawn, fallen leaves, the works. But there's a creepy-looking dummy hanging nearby and a child has been upended into the earth, with only his legs kicking wildly and helplessly in the air. No one's around to help him. In this vision, the created community of suburbia is no community at all. A couple of interior shots with female models in masks delve into the interior life. In "Dinonude 2" a woman on a couch wears a dinosaur mask. In "Beth with Mask" a woman wears a beautiful-woman mask. The mask, of course, is the classic device used to comment on the hidden self. Chassels' photographic critiques of social anomie are not exactly groundbreaking, but his work has an edge. And in "Ode to Hieronymus Bosch," a still life of rotting fruits, he demonstrates he can make a fine print with the best of them. Beata Wehr, a native of Warsaw who's been living in Tucson a few years, is the prolific painter who has filled the gallery's two biggest rooms with 27 oils on canvas painted in just the last two years. Wehr's work has the look of abstraction, with her thick bands of unnatural fauvist color painted every which way, mostly in hot hots. Yet on closer inspection most of the paintings also vaguely suggest a landscape. They're marked by strange, unnerving narrative elements drifting across the canvas. "Man with a Dog" has a horizon line and trees in the background, a simplistically rendered man and dog in the foreground. Against the hot-orange color field of the uneasy "Legs" float a pair of black legs, a couple of shapes that look like heads, and another geometric form that might be a big trunk. A couple of emotionally intense pieces heavily banded in black are reminiscent of the expressionist work of Rouault: "Sense of Sight" is a stained-glass patchwork of half-animal and half-human forms in pinks and maroons. "Strong Feelings" has a large raging human face in oranges and golds, again outlined in black. This work is vigorously painted and its surface enegertically scratched out in patches. Yet Wehr's usual handling of paint gives her paintings an odd, dry-looking texture. Her surfaces are beaded by tiny particles of paint that look as though they've dried up for lack of medium. They keep the paint from reflecting light. Much more fluid and, to my eye, more interesting are a series of brand-new Wehr works dated 1996 that have been painted in thick, buttery strokes. "Sun in a Shade" divides the canvas up into architectural shapes of arches and squares painted in glowing yellow and salmon. "Burden" finds the arch again, set in a light-filled plane of ochres and dark yellows. Abandoning the psychological tension of the earlier works, these pieces not only are celebrations of Wehr's new home in the desert. They are also celebrations of the liquid and lovely qualities of paint. An exhibition of works by Beata Wehr, Angus Chassels Jr. and Timothy Cleary continues through Saturday, March 23, at Local 803, Inc., 803 E. Helen St. Gallery hours are noon to 5 p.m. Wednesday through Saturday. For more information call 882-4625.

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