Contemporary Art Survives A Leaky Roof In A New Gallery. By Margaret Regan IT WAS A good thing, very good, that rain fell hard the weekend after Thanksgiving. At least for the Museum of Contemporary Art. The roof leaks in the Toole Avenue warehouse where the museum has temporarily alighted. "There are some pretty bad spots," says Julia Latané, a museum founder. The good part is that the rains came before Latané hung the art for the museum's inaugural show, and the pools of water on the wood floor helped her determine the no-art wet zones in the sweeping space. The museum, brainchild of sculptor Latané, her husband-photographer James Graham, and David Wright, a former gallery owner, has existed only on paper for about two years. Last Friday night, with the opening of its first show, Ignition, a wide-ranging exhibition of the work of nine artists, the museum manifested itself in brick and mortar as well. And art. "We wanted a mix of knowns and unknowns (for the show), things from every corner of contemporary art," Latané said last week, in between hanging photos by New York artist Alix Lambert. "Nothing connects the artists except for the high quality of their craftsmanship and the fact that they're working today." For its first exhibition, the museum has rented digs in a decrepit warehouse owned by the Arizona Department of Transportation along the tracks at the north end of downtown. Once a storage space for a typewriter company, Latané said, the building in recent years served as studio to neon artist Philip Hazard. When Hazard decamped for New York about a year ago, a quartet of young artists took over. The space again became available several months ago. The building adjoins the Toole Shed, a cooperative artists' space where Latané once had a studio and Graham still is a manager. They've dubbed it Haz Mat Gallery, short for hazardous materials, with a bit of nostalgia for Hazard thrown in. "I love this space," Latané declared. "It's got high enough ceilings to show big pieces. It's raw. It has an industrial feeling that gives art a different context than pure, clean smooth white walls." Museum proponents still hope to get a permanent home on Congress Street, in the old commercial buildings anchored by the former Thrifty Drug Store. That empty complex is owned by the federal government, which is expected to declare the buildings excess property early in the new year. Sometimes the feds give away such property for free to educational groups, and a political fight is looming. The MOCA group hopes the city will back its proposal to convert the old stores into a museum and art education center, with the buildings signed over at no cost. Other downtown boosters favor allowing the buildings to be sold at auction, paving the way for commercial enterprises. But MOCA decided not to wait for that battle to erupt before getting some contemporary art on display. "We wanted to start having exhibitions, to demonstrate what we're capable of and make the museum a concrete thing," Latané said. "If we want those buildings, we need to show the community what we can do." In Haz Mat, they've proved their ability to renovate on a shoestring. A volunteer crew removed a drop ceiling made of cheap fiberboard, revealing a fine old wood ceiling above. They tore down fluorescent lights and replaced them with track, painted the brick walls white, replaced warped planks in the soft wooden floor, and put new windows at the north and south ends of the long narrow space. The windows, their materials donated and cut for free, now allow an entertaining view of the trains rattling by a stone's throw of the north window. The first exhibition also argues strongly for the museum's ability to educate Tucsonans about contemporary art. Ignition brings together two painters, two photographers, three sculptors and one video artist, but these labels hardly convey how various their work is. The artists range from Olivier Mosset, a Swiss painter who represented his country at the Venice Biennale in 1990, to Tom Jennings, a Tucson engineer who thus far has publicly exhibited his eccentric electronic sculpture-inventions only on his home page on the Web. "There are now so many schools of thought (in contemporary art)," Latané said. "People are drawing from different periods of history. Everything is available to us as a subject matter. There are old materials and new materials. There are so many aesthetics at play right now." Latané co-curated the show with Elizabeth Cherry, a friend since college days at the UA and owner of Elizabeth Cherry Contemporary Art. Cherry's connections snagged Fabrice Gygi, the Swiss sculptor who contributed "Airbags," two floor sculptures made of canvas and blown up so big "you could throw yourself in them," said Cherry by telephone. Cherry also contacted Lambert, an up-and-coming New York photog who "takes on a persona and documents it." In "Male Pattern Baldness," eight black-and-white photos rimmed in rubber, Lambert impersonates a gangly men's basketball coach, complete with shaved head. Her pictures are a giddy counterpoint to the work of Eduardo Muñoz Ordoqui, a Cuban exile now residing in Mexico City. He makes unnerving photographic images of surveillance, juxtaposing grainy TV pictures with everyday objects caught in brilliant Cibachrome. Mosset, the Swiss painter and Cherry's husband, moved to Tucson two years ago. A proponent of what Cherry calls "radical painting, painting about paint," Mosset here makes his Old Pueblo debut. His two large shaped canvases are flat planes of color painted with brushstrokes so tiny they're almost invisible. "ABC," bright green and cerulean, echoes the furniture store sign outside the couple's Grant Road home; and an untitled work in brown and orange pushes the sign's soft curves into angles. The Tucson Weekly's own Joe Forkan, a painter who this month opens a solo show at the Temple Gallery, is showing four paintings as different from Mosset's as painting can be. Highly textured, veering from extreme dark to brilliant light, some of his figurative paintings adapt old photographs, rendered murky and dreamlike. Among other locals, Vikki Dempsey, the videographer who runs the UA's VideoTensions festival each summer, has a video installation reprising her recent MFA show at the university. Megan DeArmond, another UA MFA grad, is showing metal sculptures whose hard precision contrasts with the soft, emotional sculpture of Gregory Sale. Another UA master's grad, Sale, who now lives in Phoenix, made a giant wall sculpture with intimations of illness and death. Its 365 pill and vitamin bottles, lined up in rows and covered in latex, look uncannily like human spines. The show's combination of challenging art and raw space is exactly what the Museum of Contemporary Art hoped for, Latané said. "Our model is P.S. 1 in New York City. It's a low-budget place with an emphasis on art, not on marble entryways. They show really good art, and that's our mission. But it would be nice to have enough (money) to fix the roof." Ignition, the first exhibition of the Museum of Contemporary Art, is on view through February 1 at the Haz Mat Gallery, 191 E. Toole Ave. Gallery hours are 2 to 7 p.m. Wednesday through Saturday, and by appointment. For more information, call 624-5019.

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