“The Situated Image” at UC San Diego’s...

“The Situated Image” at UC San Diego’s Mandeville Gallery makes conventional exhibitions of pictures on walls seem obsolete. Guest Curator Chip Lord has brought together “media installations” by seven artists, using such diverse materials as video monitors, live birds, electric fans and old shoes.

What distinguishes these works is their dynamism, their incorporation of images into complex temporal and spatial contexts. Lord, in his catalogue introduction, comments that “the best of these works step into the arena of sculpture, define their territory and hold it well.” Though referring only to video installations, the notion holds true with regard to most of the installations.

Michael Naimark’s “Computer Eyepiece,” a computerized image of an eye projected onto a convex screen, does fail according to this criterion, for it encourages the very “passive relationship with moving pictures” that it attempts to challenge. Most of the other work exhibited transcends this static relationship by compelling the viewer to move within and around it, to listen to and interact with it.

Juan Downey’s “About Cages” (1986), a chilling piece about the victims and perpetrators of entrapment, includes audio tapes of statements by Anne Frank and an anonymous Chilean secret policeman. Their accounts of power and powerlessness play simultaneously from speakers on either side of a large birdcage upon which is mounted a video monitor. Slowly, the live birds in the cage and those shown on the screen begin to embody the helplessness of the victims described in the tapes.

In “From the Museum of Jurassic Technology” (1984-87), David Wilson constructs a series of museum-like displays, with objects enshrined in vitrines and elevated on pedestals. Attached to each of these cases is a pair of “beam-splitters,” lenses through which one sees a tiny, moving video image, illusionistically projected onto the same plane as the encased object.

In one such display, the video image of a seated man, emitting canine barks and howls, is superimposed onto the head of a stuffed fox. By situating these odd combinations of objects, images and sounds in the context of an imaginary museum of history, where one expects to be presented with facts and evidence, Wilson creates a disorienting experience for the viewer, who, according to the artist, “must be led always from familiar objects toward the unfamiliar.”

The remaining works in the show, by Janet Delaney, Anita Thacher, Tony Labat and Gary Hill, vary in interest and technical resolution. Hill’s “In Situ” (1986), involves a complex of mechanical devices that overwhelm the artist’s vision. The work was partially inoperative (and thus incomplete) during one recent visit. Despite a few such weaknesses, “The Situated Image” is an intriguing, involving show, offering a fascinating sampling from a new direction in image-making. The exhibition continues through June 14.

In the spirited atmosphere of Deloss McGraw’s work, figures float according to their own laws of gravity and limbs bend without regard for skeletal structure. Arms twist like pretzels and entire bodies make U-turns midframe. The figures are emblematic rather than literal, suggestive rather than descriptive, yet they are also clearly read. Their reductive simplicity relates as much to storybook illustrations as to Egyptian wall paintings, whose formula for representing figures frontally and in profile simultaneously for greater comprehension is shared by McGraw.

McGraw’s watercolors, prints and sculptures, on view at the Felicita Foundation Gallery (247 S. Kalmia St., Escondido), convey the innocence of a young child’s dreams. But within these naive and playful fantasies lies a soulful questioning, a gentle but pressing venture into themes of isolation, maturation and human relationships.

In the painting “Solo,” a lone figure is literally blowing his own horn while hovering in space. Rust-red handprints surface from beneath the yellow ocher ground as if echoing the figure’s assertion of individuality. His visibility and vulnerability in this imaginary space are slightly haunting, though his striped body, green face and varicolored hands lend the scene an air of circus-like frivolity.

McGraw’s figures are on journeys through space, time and states of mind. Their transitory states are captured in the interplay of transparent and opaque watercolors and the contrast of dark or muted tones with vibrant yellows, greens and magentas. The textural and tonal richness of McGraw’s surfaces and the dual character of his imagery recall artists such as Dubuffet and Chagall, but McGraw’s works are truly in a world of their own.

The exhibition, culled from private collections in Escondido and Beverly Hills, continues through June 20.

Barbara Strasen’s exhibition “Perception as a Mirror,” at Gallery Store (724 Broadway) through June 9, uses the mask form as a starting point for exploring the affinities between human and animal natures. Strasen applies viscous paint, miniature figures and a variety of painted signs and designs to masks that vaguely blend human and animal features. Cartoon-like airplanes and helicopters scatter across one mask; a desert landscape covers another.

Several of the masks are beautifully resolved, including one that bears a small sand-encrusted bird skull on its forehead and a flock of white birds enmeshed in its creamily painted surface. Another presents a visual rhyme by joining two masks, one mirroring the image painted on the other.

These are attractive works but anomalies among their superficial neighbors. Considering the rich symbolism inherent in the mask form itself, often embodying concepts of illusion, revelation and animistic power, Strasen’s use of it primarily as a shell for applied decoration is disappointingly banal. Her blandly painted watercolors, also on display, do not complement the masks, but suggest the show’s need for tighter editing.