The Natalie Bush Gallery (908 E St.)...

The Natalie Bush Gallery (908 E St.) has on exhibit four large oil paintings on canvas (each 7 by 7 feet) and two small paintings on paper by San Diego-based artist Lynn Engstrom. They are energetic, aggressive, expressionist paintings, thick with impasto in a full palette of colors. Though abstract, the paintings are inspired by a construction by the artist in her studio. Strangely enough, it includes such homey items as old-fashioned quilts and kitchen chairs. As Engstrom works serially on a group of paintings, she rearranges the components of her still life.

The most impressive work is the most recent, “Polka Dot Apron.” Engstrom proves that expressive abstraction is still a vital idiom.

The exhibition continues through May 24.

Sushi (852 8th Ave.) is showing a photo installation by Jayce Salloum. Titled “man’ oeuvre,” the group of photographic prints may be interpreted ambiguously as “maneuver,” tactical movement, or, combining English and French, as “man work.”

Salloum, a master’s degree candidate at UC San Diego who has previously exhibited in Europe and Japan as well as the United States, has said that “man’oeuvre” is an installation using Ektacolor photographs and mirrors “within a confined space designed for pedestrian traffic. The photographs of males in a variety of postures and states are taken from broadcast television. Each photograph portrays a stereotypical role or emotive condition that, once withdrawn from the immediacy of a television broadcast, becomes a more generalized notion. The questions of fiction/nonfiction, television and memory are provoked in the context of emotionally charged images with personal connotations. The piece is informed and at the same time completed by the audience.”

Being a solitary visitor is an eerie experience, so bring some friends. There is a real surprise in seeing yourself reflected live across a crowded room among enlarged, unreal TV images. As the artist has commented, “We don’t often get a chance to view ourselves in an art gallery.”

The exhibition continues through May 31.

The Natural History Museum in Balboa Park, in another of its “pocket” exhibitions devoted to artists who use the imagery of nature in their work, is showing paintings by Ethel Greene and drawings by Jean Swigget.

Titled “A Dual Nature,” the exhibition contrasts Swigget’s classic realism with Greene’s haunting surrealism. Swigget’s drawings in graphite and Prismacolor of plants such as euphorbia and ocotillo are precise. Nevertheless, he may also introduce traditional symbolism, as in “Owl of Athena,” in which the bird favored by the Greek goddess and representing wisdom appears.

You easily recognize the images in Greene’s works, but their relationships are unusual and their meanings enigmatic. In “Sleeping Beauty and the Prince,” for example, the handsome driver of a car peers inquisitively at the fetal form of a nude blonde woman in a box on a grassy slope below a freeway ramp. In the crepuscular landscape “Blue Tree,” a young woman gazes into a green pond in which the leafy tree to her right is reflected bare and she is reflected nude, while seven sheep browse in the mid-ground.

This small exhibition of works by two veteran San Diego artists continues through June 22.

Rarely has an exhibition generated as much publicity in this town as Beth Ames Swartz’s “A Moving Point of Balance,” described as a “multimedia art experience to liberate the mind and stimulate the senses,” now at the Multicultural Arts Center (425 Market St.).

Swartz believes that, “By healing ourselves, we heal others, and ultimately help to transform our culture.” Like many savants before her, she believes in art as social medicine. Where English socialists like John Ruskin preached the decoration of the environment and improvement of society to make better individuals, Swartz preaches personal salvation as a precondition for cultural progress. Like many, many others who have gone through a spiritual rebirth, Swartz wants to share her experience with others, always a chancy undertaking. To this end the artist has created an installation, which is a visual and spiritual journey.

You begin it in the Crystal Quartz Light Bath, where there is a Navajo medicine wheel laid out by the late Indian healer David Paladin. Then you view seven paintings sequentially, each one representing a chakra, or energy center, relating to a part of the body, from the base of the spine to the crown of the head. (Why not begin with the feet, which are closest to the earth?)

As you move from chakra to chakra, you are bathed serially in the colors of the spectrum from red through violet. You end your journey in the Crystal Balancing Room, where you “experience a kinetically balanced kaleidoscope of moving spectral colors and crystalline shapes,” combining “the principles of ancient Indian crystal medicine with the latest in sophisticated light and optics technology.” Cliche mood music by Frank Smith obscures the traffic noise from outside but intrudes upon whatever private experience you might have.

I will not comment about the curative efficacy of this contemporary traveling medicine show. As to the art, it is very theatrical, possibly appropriate for the ballet “Sheherezade.”

The exhibition continues through May 25.