Janet De Berge Lange Uses Junk To Poke And Punch At Men, Catholicism, And The Fifties. By Margaret Regan WHEN JANET DE Berge Lange was a little girl growing up in Phoenix, she told her father she was going to be an artist. What she meant was that she would become an expert at drawing and painting. But that was in the 1950s, when Lange had more conventional ideas about everything. As a first grader, for instance, she felt like the odd girl out when she wore jeans for her class picture: Every other little girl wore a dress. The revealing class portrait with the denim-covered future artist turns up in "She Prayed for a Dress," one of Lange's decidedly unconventional mixed-media pieces in the Damaged Goods exhibition at the Union Gallery. (The show also includes the work of Sean O'Donnell.) Besides the picture, "She Prayed for a Dress" also features a partly painted party dress, a Catholic scapular, worn to induce salvation, and a baseball glove. As the piece demonstrates, it's been a long time since the artist considered graphite or paint as her primary medium. Nowadays, Lange is the self-styled Queen of Salvage. What a Queen of Salvage does is take all kinds of junk, such as oil cans and plastic Sacred Heart statues, magazine photos, old mirrors and Dad's Root Beer cans, and turn them into art. It's an art for a specialized taste, no doubt, an art that manifests itself in strange shrine-like wall pieces and little whiskey-box houses on pedestals. An art that wittily, and scathingly, takes on multitudinous sacred cows, from the Catholic Church and its misogynism, to America's testosteronic militarism, to that old standby, gender relations, especially as they were envisioned in the rigid '50s. Lange is so bold that she even criticizes Mother Teresa, the beloved, still-living, yet-to-be canonized saint. "Contradiction," perhaps her most scathing critique of the church, includes a large medallion of the Blessed Mother, who contradictorily became a mother without the disgrace of losing her virginity, and a found magazine picture of the holy Teresa allowing the notorious dictator Ferdinand Marcos to kiss her hand. The whole thing, embellished with wings, a tile cross, and, incongruously, a row of plastic superheroes, is fastened to a delicate silver household tray. Odd most definitely, but Lange's concoctions wield a strong aesthetic and emotional power, borrowing as they do from traditional religious art forms. The wall pieces, made of trays and shelves and mirrors, take their inspiration from churchly triptychs. The junk affixed to them in such lovely ways is reminiscent of the candy wrappers and toys and soda bottles in Mexican popular altars and household shrines. There's a lot of anger in Lange's work. "Hormonal Imbalance" is an anti-military peephole box that has a medical diagram of an erect penis drawn right on top of a picture of a (patriot alert!) U.S. flag. "Pumpkin-Eater," a takeoff on the nursery rhyme about Peter, that early abusive husband, is a small work with a woman's undergarments in paper, bound by padlock and chain. And "Esther's Answers," which quotes a black woman about how hard it is never to be invisible, has a savage old print of a racially stereotyped pickaninny set in the middle of pictures of smoothly decorous white men and women. But Lange can also be laugh-out-loud funny, especially when she pokes gentle fun at men. "Men on Monuments" is a good piece for the current Father's Day season. It's a wall work made of a rough set of shelves, just like Dad would keep in the garage. And it's filled with Dad's stuff: oil cans, paint cans, cans of chemical tablets, though there are a couple of Mom's cans, a can of black pepper, a can of tea, evidently borrowed from the kitchen. On top of each and every can is a tiny painted figure of a U.S. president, from Washington on up to Eisenhower. (Ike is last possibly because so much of Lange's imagery is steeped in the '50s, her formative years.) Despite some mild points about gender stereotypes and male power, this is mostly just funny, with those manly little guys standing so pompously atop their manly tins. "A Meeting at Dad's" continues the theme. This one is a little house--or Dad's garage again?--made out of a wooden Dewar's whiskey box and roofed with flattened-out Dad's Root Beer cans. Inside, the meeting is a hoot. Lange, who must have the largest collection of Catholic kitsch outside of Robert Francis Religious Goods in Upper Darby, Pa., my old haunt, has positioned plastic saints on more paint cans inside. On the walls are weird '50s photos of refined women serving tea delicately, except they're in the nude. Beaming over the whole scene is Jesus on the tallest can. He's leading the meeting and this is his place. Suddenly you realize: God and Dad, they're one and the same. Damaged Goods, an exhibition of mixed-media work by Janet De Berge Lange and Sean O'Donnell, continues through June 28 at Union Gallery on the first floor of the University of Arizona Student Union. Gallery hours are 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Monday through Friday, but call ahead since it's staffed by student volunteers. For more information call 621-5123.

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