In Mario Lara’s installation, “Big World Little...

In Mario Lara’s installation, “Big World Little House,” at the Gallery of the Centro Cultural de la Raza in Balboa Park, deceptively simple means are employed to create complex, engaging spaces.

“Space Station,” a two-tiered structure made of metal scaffolding and wooden planks painted red, affords those who ascend it a bird’s-eye perspective of the Centro’s entrance, performance area and interior murals. Climbing its steep metal stairs and moving from platform to platform evokes the benign and playful sensations of occupying a tree house.

Across the room, “Big World Outpost,” also of red wood, affords its occupants another elevated view, this time into the Centro’s offices and, immediately below, into a dark room containing only a miniature version of a solid-black house. Black walls form three sides of this enclosure, and a 12-foot-high picket fence makes up the fourth, separating this area from the rest of the gallery.

Lara agilely undermines the security and protection associated with the picket fence form by exaggerating its height and exchanging its traditional calm white for a heated red, thus turning the fence into an element of danger and tension. The fence posts’ long shadows loom over the subtly spotlighted house, overpowering it and oppressing it like the bars of a jail cell.

One can enter the ground-level enclosure through a passageway framed by diagonal yellow and black stripes--along with the intense red of the structure, a sign of danger and hazard, a warning. Inside, one experiences the disjunctive scale of one’s own body and the relativity of one’s position in the world. Looking down at the calf-high house, one feels dominant, oversized, threatening, like the two human cut-out forms called “Big Others” that stand outside the enclosure.

Lara’s previous architectural site works--extremely well-documented in an adjacent exhibition and slide presentation--deal similarly with changing viewers’ perceptions of architectural and natural spaces. By creating opportunities for people to alter their positions in space and in relation to surrounding elements, Lara orchestrates responses of power, fear, security and vulnerability.

His skills in design and construction lend his structures an authority that makes them particularly convincing and affecting. The technical solidity of the works is matched by the strength of their conception in an all-too-rare confluence of form and content. “Big World Little House” is not only the newest, but also perhaps the most compelling demonstration of Lara’s impressive abilities.

The exhibition continues through Sept. 18. An artist’s lecture and discussion will be held tonight from 7 to 10 at the Centro Cultural.

A three-person show at the Southwestern College Art Gallery (900 Otay Lakes Road) offers moments of insight, humor and pleasure, but none of the artists manages to sustain these qualities consistently throughout his work.

Brian Bosch presents two series of work, one with a good deal of grace and subtlety, the other slightly heavy-handed. In the first, he represents tenuous balances and ephemeral states of paper bags and their shadows. Both are rendered in folded sheet steel and placed in various positions on the floor and wall. Bosch’s provocative titles--”The True Does Not Conceal the False. The Bent Does Not Hide the Straight”--help these mundane objects assume life as vehicles of poetry.

In Bosch’s other series, “This is the Ceremony,” flat clay slabs, fired to an earthy gray, are suspended by rope from five standing steel rod constructions. Within each of these slabs is a glass window, edged in white and bearing a poem in black, mechanical type.

Peter Kilian’s oil paintings and mixed media constructions cling to the current trend of appropriating texts and images from various sources in the public domain. Kilian uses cartoon imagery, stenciled letters, quotations from Greek, Egyptian and modern art in painted montages that verge on social satire but only rarely show enough resolution to achieve it.

One such instance occurs with a painting, “Celestial Mechanics,” whose three robed monks (holding a book, a tennis racquet, a baseball and bat) are juxtaposed with images of Christ on the cross and a moonscape.

Kilian adopts a number of representational approaches, from trompe l’oeil to naive, epitomizing the post-modern practice of grabbing freely from the great big pot of established styles. But in doing so, Kilian’s own voice nearly smothers under the weight of outside influences, especially David Salle’s, whose paintings of disjunctive, overlaid forms similarly leave the viewer hungry for a consolidated opinion.

Bill Mosley paints San Diego cityscapes in a straightforward, slightly dry style that shows the city as a quiet, still place infused with golden light. In the attractive “Columbia Street,” Mosley sets a jumbled parking lot of cars in the foreground against the more constrained, rectilinear order of the surrounding city.

The show continues through Sept. 4 and is open by appointment only. Call 224-2565, 235-8720 or 421-6700, extension 292, for more information.