ORANGE COUNTY

“Along the Street of Knives,” a collaborative installation of photographs and sculpture by Hanh Thi Pham and Richard Turner, approaches a painful topic with artistic grace and emotional horror. Their work is handsomely designed and elegantly finished, but its heart is mired in the cultural devastation of the Vietnam era.

Hanh Thi Pham, a Vietnamese refugee, settled in Southern California in 1975 and has established herself as a photographer of provocative tableaux based on her experiences. Turner, a native American who went to Vietnam with his family and attended his last two years of high school there, is a local sculptor whose works’ allusions to Southeast Asia heretofore have been relatively subtle. In their joint project, both artists unleash their darkest fears about the legacy of the Vietnamese conflict as they cross into each other’s aesthetic territory and pose in dreamlike color pictures.

A bamboo ladder, a knife wrapped in snakeskin, shards of glass, a pile of sand bags and slashing strokes of paint set the stage for the theatrical group of photographs and occasionally reappear within them. The artists (sometimes assuming multiple identities in the same picture) and a couple of extras act out scenes ranging in tone from gut-wrenching violence to wistful observation.

All the photos are layered with trappings of Eastern and Western cultures, and all the action takes place on dark backgrounds, lending an air of awful secrecy and psychologically charged intrigue. It’s as if these situations are floating around in people’s minds, too elusive to be dealt with but too entrenched to be forgotten.

We find two people hanging by their feet in one picture while a man submerges a bound man’s head in a tub of water. In another, Vietnamese women climb a ladder and spring from bushes, unseen by a flashily casual pair of beer-swigging Americans. Mickey Mouse rears his cute little head--and symbolizes unreal ways of dealing with reality--as a well-dressed American couple looks into a room where a Vietnamese woman holds a mouse doll up to scrutiny.

The most impressive thing about this installation is that it takes a political stance without turning into propaganda. The “Knives” turn more slowly than posteresque proclamations, but they wedge themselves into memory. (BC Space, 235 Forest Ave., Laguna Beach, to April 27.)