Davis Dominguez Gallery Presents Its Annual Small Works Invitational. By Margaret Regan CHALK IT UP to the heat. Davis Dominguez Gallery is taking it a little easier than usual this summer. Instead of its accustomed two-part summer showcase of Tucson artists, the gallery has pared the Annual Small Works Invitational down to just one part, and that will be up only for the first half of the summer. The gallery, says co-owner Mike Dominguez, will probably close for much of the month of August. Now in its fourth year, the Small Works Invitational has become something of a summertime tradition. In past years, gallery owners Candice Davis and Dominguez invited some 70 local artists to submit a single, small work of art, for a two-part show celebrating the depth of local talent. But the change in plan isn't because of a sudden exodus of artists from our torrid zones or heat-induced painterly anomie. There will indeed be a Part II, but it will go up when it's nice and cool, along about December, as part of a holiday gala celebrating the gallery's shockingly long life of 20 years. As for Part I, up now through July 27, it's a pleasant, somewhat uneven gathering of works by 34 artists. Like most sultry summer shows, it's negligibly themed, the works being limited only by size and by geographic origin in the Tucson environs. This being a contemporary art gallery, that doesn't mean what you get is Southwest art, though there are a couple of vaguely Southwestern-themed pieces. Dean Narcho, a Tohono O'odham painter and shaman, contributed a thickly painted abstraction of swirls, "Otham Autumn," a composition in fall colors that suggests the movements of traditional dance. Margo Burwell, a Rancho Linda Vista painter turned craftswoman, has made "Set of Bowls and Gourd," a sculptural stacking of functional wooden carvings, brightly enameled in Southwest geometric designs in orange and blue. Philip Melton's "Greaterville" is a deft Southwest landscape in acrylic on canvas, a familiar long view of blue-purple mountains rising in the distance beyond a pink and gold desert floor. Most of the artists, though they may be inspired by the local habitat, stray far from Melton's realism. D. Lawrence West's small acrylic painting, "Ventana," perhaps owes its origins to the canyon of the same name, but it is a fine little abstraction painted in gold and reddish browns, gleaming on wood. Linda Rosenfield, a Pima Community College prof, continues her exploration of abstract geometrics in "No. 111 From the Anti-Gravity Series," a jazzy-colored drawing of cones and squares and assorted globular shapes. M.T. Stack's flatly painted "Rascal" also deals with multi-layers of geometric designs, mostly circles and loops. Paul Waid's untitled oil on canvas is Stack's opposite number. Waid's piece is so thickly painted as to border on three-dimensional, and in contrast to Stack's cerebral layerings, Waid's is an emotional explosion of color, with curved bands spiraling out from a central blue orb. But in these hot days, the eye is inevitably drawn to works in blue and green, to art that evokes cooler climes and life-giving water. James Davis, one of Tucson's best and best-known painters, happily continues the beach themes so pervasive in his Etherton Gallery show last fall. His "Paradise Now on Black Island" is a small, densely colored mixed media on paper filled with rich variations of welcome blue and green coloring his waters and sky. The piece explores his usual territory, the mysterious psyche. There's a murky body--dead or alive?--lying on the beach, and clustered all around it are curious sea animals, a turtle, bird, a dragonfly. James Cook, who filled this same gallery last winter with virtuoso paintings of the western landscape, mercifully takes us down to the sea in "Cape Elizabeth," a small oil on canvas. In thick slabs of violently applied paint, the work evokes the sea and sky and rocks. Pamela Marks' "Branch," a gouche and casein on paper, is a green branch set on a white bone-like spiral. In this desiccated season it seems to deliver a warning of nature captured by dry death. And Lynn Taber-Borcherdt's gloriously rendered pastel of western skies, "Before the Storm," is as heartfelt as a prayer. Pushing aside the hot golden clouds that hover over the heat-stricken landscape, are dark blue-gray clouds that will, at last, bring the redeeming rains. The Fourth Annual Small Works Invitational, Part I, continues through July 27 at Davis Dominguez Gallery, 6812 N. Oracle Road. Hours are 10 a.m. to 5 p.m Tuesday through Friday, and 10 a.m. to 5 p.m Saturdays. For more information call 297-1427.

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