In group shows, ideas with taut, lean...

In group shows, ideas with taut, lean and provocative profiles are often forced to cohabit with flabby, muddled concepts. Sharing close quarters does little to enhance the lesser work and usually diffuses the impact of the better. This leveling of quality turns Installation Gallery’s current show (930 E St., through March 18) into a mediocre affair, though the works within are either far better or far worse than middling.

Mark Niblock’s installation and Barbara Sexton’s drawings still manage to shine despite the burdensome company of the surrounding work, but a more thoughtful grouping could have emboldened their messages even more. Niblock, Sexton and an installation by Brent Riggs all address aspects of physical power and contemporary society’s perverse addiction to militarism.

In Niblock’s “War Stories,” the ability to extinguish another’s life is portrayed as uncannily satisfying. The installation spans three walls of a room, with each wall bearing a text in its center and an array of small objects mounted across the entire surface. An autobiographical story on one wall, studded with rabbit’s foot charms, tells of a young man’s first driving lesson, a rite of passage charged with sexual tension. Alone with his uncle’s girlfriend, far from town, the boy revels in the power of the car’s acceleration and the woman’s approval. As he savors this feeling of transition from childhood to manhood, he accidentally runs over a rabbit. The killing, “so quick, so sudden, so easy,” leaves him with a feeling of calm.

That feeling returns in the story on the opposite wall, which tells of the purposeful killing of an enemy soldier during the Vietnam war. While both episodes are painful to visualize, Niblock emphasizes that, for the perpetrators of the violence, the experiences are strangely positive and satisfying. That notion serves as the foundation for the third text, a statistical account of the financial, scientific and other resources worldwide that are being channeled toward enlarging and perfecting our capacity to kill. Against this wall, Niblock has assembled an orderly display of miniature flags, a reminder of the rationale offered for these expenditures.

Niblock makes a penetrating and challenging point in this installation: whether substantiated by arguments of political domination or patriotism, people fight and kill because it fulfills a basic human instinct or at least provides a perverse pleasure. In our institutionalized culture, violence has even become a profession, complete with opportunities for advancement and rewards for achievement. Niblock, a Los Angeles-based artist, strikes at one of the most perplexing problems of our age, the spiraling hunger of the war machine, with unsettling candor and keen graphic clarity.

Sexton’s intricate drawings add the seductive forces of television and material possession to the complex military and political stew. In her series, “Drawn to D.C.,” she breaks down a huge map of the Washington, D.C. area into nine panels and arranges them in a grid formation. Using the paper map as a support, she draws a rich weave of images, all symbols of power, from soldiers and weapons to bones and body builders.

Scattered across the nine panels, the images appear fragmented and unloosed, but collectively they portray a nation pervaded by might, media and death. The hub of the city, the capital itself, is outlined by a noose, which, in turn, is framed by the shape of a television screen. National suicide would, after all, be a major media event.

In another series, “State of the Art,” Sexton again draws on the surface of maps and frames her images as if on a television screen. The maps here show the northeastern United States, another power sector of the country, the heart of the nation’s mass media. Each work contains a punning, provocative verbal equation and various drawn images.

Repeated shapes of houses and stately columns surround the phrase “Money + Culture = More,” a jab at the addictive nature of private ownership. In “Value + Color = Valor,” images of chess pieces and barbed wire reinforce the notions of racial distinctions, discrimination and superiority. Other works, such as “Politics + Power = PR” and “Life + War = Liar,” evade concrete interpretation but evoke a wealth of associations through their fusion of common words and symbols.

Riggs’ installation, “In the Service of Church and State,” attempts to suggest a similar confluence of societal powers, but his facile overlay of images and media lacks the refinement and cohesion of Sexton’s drawings. Riggs projects four film fragments, simultaneously, onto separate quadrants of a wall, each of which contains a framed painting, one showing the Pope, another John Wayne. Audio tapes play clips from a political speech and military music from separate speakers. Riggs is clearly trying to draw a connection between the military, the government and the church, but his means are so haphazard and simplistic that the installation boils down only to a brief spurt of chaos.

Greg Ewing’s paintings adopt the same additive approach, combining symbols and signs both recognizable and covert, in the hope that something profound will emerge. But, like the show itself (which also contains the bland, overworked paintings of Lynn Engstrom), this gathering of parts never gels or coalesces into an intelligent whole. Ewing, a local artist, organized part of the show, calling the grouping of his work and that of fellow San Diegans Engstrom and Sexton “Process Elimination.”

The excellent and the extraneous come face to face here, but spark no stimulating dialogue. Whether guided by ambivalence or left to anarchy, this show’s slack curatorial program does a disservice to the few thoughtful works within.