As its title suggests, Jayce Salloum’s “...

As its title suggests, Jayce Salloum’s “ . . . In the Absence of Heroes . . . “ Part IV: Warfare/A Case for Context (Relentless Verity) is a show with meaty but meandering ideas. The show, at the Natalie Bush Gallery (908 E St.) through Sept. 12, contains five large photographic works and a 45-minute video, both fractional components of a larger, continuing project that also incorporates slide projections and performance.

Salloum, a Canadian artist now working toward a master’s degree at UC San Diego, examines how popular perceptions of war are shaped by the actual and fictional accounts of it that permeate the media. The video shown here combines gritty documentary footage with film clips that glorify and romanticize war, rendering its players unqualified heroes. Various religious, interpersonal and strategic dimensions of war are spliced together with occasional poignancy.

In the main, however, the video is dominated by cliches, the same cliches that Salloum purportedly aims to dispel. The struggle, then, between rhetoric and reality seems to end in a dead heat, rather than a clear victory for the artist’s critical vision.

Salloum directs his message more effectively in the photographs, large (50-by-60-inch) archival images that he has manipulated by scratching off the photographic emulsion, or painting out sections in gold, silver or black. The power of these images derives in part from Salloum’s undermining of photography’s specificity, its unique ability to render a particular moment in time. By painting out and concealing the identities of the people in the pictures, Salloum transforms them from individuals to universal symbols.

The military men at a strategy session in “ . . . Weight in Gold, Amblie, France, Aug. 7, 1944” become anonymous and timeless by being painted solid gold. In “A Special Role, (Near) Bourbon, France, October 1918,” Salloum scratches away the contextual landscape to isolate a fallen soldier in a field of white, broken up only by the victim’s gun, tangled amid twigs and scattering shells.

Salloum’s alterations transform the original photographs into mysterious dramas, powerful comments on the anonymity and ambiguity of war. The accompanying video, diffused and somewhat numbing, could benefit from the concentration of energy Salloum shows in these images.

San Francisco painters Sara Slotnick and Kiki Felix are exhibiting together at the Grossmont College Art Gallery (8800 Grossmont College Drive). Both confine their formal vocabularies to simple, geometric shapes that, according to the artists’ statements, aim to convey meanings beyond themselves, but come across as primarily decorative and surface-oriented.

Slotnick paints patterns of repeated and combined squares, stripes, spirals and other basic forms in oils, using modeling paste to raise the contour of each form and give the surfaces texture. Many of the panels juxtapose two sections of varying pattern, such as vertical stripes and checkerboards, and are titled (“Rhyme and Reason,” “Odd and Even”) to reflect this collision.

The artist writes that the repetition and juxtaposition of these different patterns “are symbols or signposts for something deeper,” but she gives few visual clues as to what that inner meaning might be. She makes some allusions to topography, in “Aerial View” and “Map of Southwest,” in which landscapes are depicted as flat black, white and colored geometric shapes. Though Slotnick’s geometry is personal and handcrafted, it embodies no compelling vision or voice.

Felix’s primary motif is the cone shape, painted in dashes of gold and gray as if caught in spinning motion. Set against patterned backgrounds or colorful shape-scapes, the cones assume an animate character, as if figures interacting. Felix gives her works physical depth by attaching certain forms to the surface in shallow relief, making them appear to hover and cast shadows. The paintings are spirited and playful, composed in a refreshing palette of cool green, pink, magenta and yellow, but like Slotnick’s, they fail to convey much emotional depth.

For most of this century, especially since the first powerfully abstract paintings of Wassily Kandinsky, artists have tried to invest their triangles, circles and squares with spiritual force. Few succeed. Slotnick and Felix number among the majority whose efforts are earnest but unfulfilling.

The show continues through Sept. 11.