SIGHTS AROUND TOWN : Home Field : With his ‘Stadium VII’ exhibit, Antonio Muntadas explores a vast subject in a confined area.

For his strangely fascinating installation work, “Stadium VII,” Spanish-born artist Antonio Muntadas has managed a trick of scale.

Working in the confines of the Santa Barbara Museum of Art’s galleries, Muntadas has set out to explore the paradoxical nature of stadiums throughout history and across cultures. Part of his premise is the idea that, particularly in the last century, stadiums have shaped humanity as grand forums for propagandistic and religious rituals, sports and entertainment. How does one approach a subject so vast within the humble scale of the museum’s contemporary art gallery? Therein lies the art of the matter.

While spectacle and mass hysteria are the subjects on his spatial canvas here, Muntadas achieves his goal with fairly humble means.

Much of Muntadas’ story is told via a multilayered soundtrack. We hear an ebb and flow of crowd noises, snippets of anthem music (from Prince to patriotic tunes) and oratory. But the speeches are deliberately taken out of context, with the punch lines--and party lines--stripped away. Muntadas allows none of the careful manipulations of stadium events to reach their intended fever pitch.

Slides are projected in four corners of the darkened room, casting a diverse sampling of stadium imagery. The imagery isn’t arranged in any conventional dramatic or rational way, but instead jumps through time and topic. Hitler rallies, rock concerts, Pentecostal extravaganzas, sporting events, political gatherings and crowd shots add up to a delirious composite portrait.

One screen is devoted to photographs of the mundane physical aspects of stadiums, from empty seats to dumpsters. While the byword of stadiums is grandeur--architecturally, historically, culturally and emotionally--Muntadas takes a close-up view.

Key words are inserted periodically into the slide trays: LOSERS, HYSTERIA, HEROES, CIRCUS, SMOKE, CONGRESS, STRATEGY. . . . These linguistic reference points, while slyly alluding to the theoretical bases of the work, still stop short of making simple didactic points.

At the center of the installation is a miniature stadium, an oval ring of ceiling-high pillars that consumes much of the gallery. Footage of crazed, swaying fans is projected onto the floor in the oval’s center, capturing them in some unspecified ritualistic abandon. And who can deny the tacit symbolic connection between the grand oval and the womb?

Muntadas also plays with the all-enclosing design of most stadiums, and how they can seem like closed caldrons into which heaps of humanity are poured.

By stirring up a multisensory, non-linear and non-specific stew of source materials, “Stadiums VII” subverts the very nature of stadium events, which tend to be tightly focused if not single-minded. Stadium shows and rallies are geared toward marshaling the sentiments of masses into a sort of mental lockstep.

This is the seventh in a series of site-specific works by Muntadas, and he has included site-specific references to such local venues as the Santa Barbara County Bowl, Earl Warren Showgrounds and the only true contender in town, UC Santa Barbara’s Harder Stadium.

“Stadium VII” is the most hypnotic and compelling installation the museum has hosted since Richard Dunlap’s “Intersphere” took over the larger McCormick Gallery 11 years ago. There, Dunlap plotted slowly evolving linear wall patterns with an elaborate projection system, combined with ambient sound sources.

From a distance, the Muntadas installation might not seem as abstract as that. But “Stadium VII” moves from hard facts and bracing realities into the realm of dreams and nightmares. It’s about thinking big, and thinking wide.

“Things on My Mind,” the current show at the Frances Puccinelli Gallery in Carpinteria, showcases a charming crop of images from some distinctive minds.

The works come out of the art studio of Santa Barbara’s Alpha Training Center, where instructors Michael Blaha, Paula Etherington and Karen Elaine Thomas encourage the creative outpourings of adults who are developmentally disabled.

The art in “Things on My Mind” is inviting, warm and bright. Cora Sutherland, for instance, depicts animals with a disarming directness. (This must be Sutherland’s month. Her work can also presently be seen in the “Artists Pick Artists” show at the Contemporary Arts Forum in Santa Barbara.)

Joan Myer’s pictorial domain is an innocent landscape of country livin’ and smiling animals. Scott Clarkson combines a cowboy theme and a mysterious scene. Blaine Weirbach’s relief pieces, with wood scraps piled on freely and painted without restraint, hang on the walls.

Of the lot, the most versatile artist may be Alex Villa, who works in different media and shows several large canvases. He has a vibrant sense of color and form, plotting grinning stick figures in mysterious abstract spaces.

Much like the large art exhibition at Camarillo State Hospital last spring, the Puccinelli show celebrates the pure creative spirit. Direct, unpretentious and unsentimental image-making can come from artists working without the historical and stylistic baggage that fine artists often grapple with.

The Alpha Training Center suffered a blow when the 1990 Painted Cave Fire razed its facility on Cathedral Oaks Road in Santa Barbara, and proceeds from this show go toward the center’s rebuilding. It’s encouraging to see almost all of the pieces graced with red dots, indicating that they’ve been sold.

Warning to procrastinators: This show closes after Saturday’s gallery hours.

WHERE AND WHEN

“Stadium VII,” a multimedia exhibition by Antonio Muntadas, will be at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, 1130 State St. in Santa Barbara, through Jan. 12.

“Things on My Mind,” a group show at Frances Puccinelli Gallery, 888 Linden Ave., second floor, in Carpinteria, runs through Saturday.