Strong Impact Provided by Installations : Art: Exhibits by two artists at the Southwestern College Gallery leave a powerful impression.

Two immensely powerful installations are now on view at the Southwestern College Art Gallery (900 Otay Lakes Road) under the collective title, “Blood is Thicker.” To enter each environment is to step into a living memory, a realm ripe with tenderness, pain, suffering and inspiration.

Slightly dampened peat moss covers the floor of Johnny Coleman’s installation, “City/Country/City: Song for David.” The cushioned ground inspires slower movement, hushed actions, heightened senses. Gradually, Coleman’s work unfolds as both an intensely personal homage to the artist’s family and as a poignant, pointed reflection on the history of African-Americans.

Coleman’s message comes in the form of stories that, written on chalkboard-like surfaces, read as lessons. On one blackened wall, he describes the intellectual suppression of his brother, David, who answered his teacher’s challenge to write his name, only to be slapped--hard. On another panel, this time suspended from the ceiling, Coleman tells of a slave who dug himself a cave as a home away from his master’s control.

Both of these tales are written faintly, over other lines of script that are nearly erased away. David’s story overlaps a traditional American racist jingle, while the slave’s account hovers over a written chorus of “down on my knees down down down on my knees down down . . . By making each layer slight and fragile, Coleman calls attention to the transience of the human voice. Two forces work against the permanence of such voices in history, the natural erasures of time and the will of later generations who wish them to be suppressed.

Coleman’s writings stem from a tender desperation to preserve those voices. The installation achieves that goal poetically as well as literally in recordings of family conversations. Four audio speakers hang from the ceiling, one in each corner of a wood-framed room. The soft voices are easily drowned out by the everyday noises of the space, just as the stories written in chalk would vanish at the slightest pressure of a body brushing by.

Beyond the voices, Coleman gives other potent signs of human presence, of suffering endured and of integrity and traditions maintained. Strings of peanuts, sacks of black-eyed peas, boxes of rice, shelves of dried leaves and flowers and rows of rusted forks all feel endowed with ritual, spiritual significance. They are reminders of meaning--of crops picked, tools used, food eaten, beauty experienced.

Like Coleman, Albert Chong is a graduate student at UC San Diego, and his installation, too, has both haunting and inspiring effect, and is rich with details of intensified power. His “Sunday Dinner for the Ancestors” is set on a thick bed of chicken feathers and framed by a low rock wall. As in Chong’s recent installation at MiraCosta College, the feathers define a spiritual arena, a space infused with memory, age and the sacrificial, ritual traditions of Santeri’a, which blends Christian and African forms of worship.

Table and chairs stand ready for the spirits to arrive, though half-smoked cigars suggest that they are already there. Chong has covered his table with a cloth of copper and set it with plates full of aging food, glasses of gin and rum from the artist’s native Jamaica. Reeds sprout from the center of the table, catching stray feathers and evoking a place where time has truly taken over.

Each of the four old wooden chairs bears a different skin--one matches the copper tablecloth and sports a row of dreadlocks, another is wrapped in dried fish skin and thorns, and another covered with reeds and sharp plant tines. The fourth uses animal horns as legs. A small, shell-lined box sits open on one of the chairs, a single butterfly displayed within.

Like Coleman’s installation, Chong’s is rife with fetishistic objects, unexpected textures and the desire to preserve the spirits of the dead, their lessons, their ways, if not the form and feeling of their lives.

Both installations engage all of the senses, from the feel of feathers beneath the feet to the fresh smell of peat moss, the faint sound of voices, the imagined taste of the food on the plates, and the extraordinary sights of these other worlds, rooted in the present and evoking continuity with the past.

The pairing--by gallery director Larry Urrutia--of these two tremendously absorbing works is brilliant. They remain on view through March 20. Gallery hours are 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Tuesday through Friday, Wednesday and Thursday evenings from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m.