ART : ‘Speaking in Tongues’ Could Use Interpreter : Alfonzo Moret’s new installation at the Saddleback College Art Gallery seems diffuse and unresolved.

I didn’t get to see Alfonzo Moret’s “House of Veils” installation at the Afro-American Museum in Los Angeles last winter, but those in the know remarked on the adroitness with which words and images associated with either black or white culture (notably, references to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel “Uncle Tom’s Cabin”) were chosen to raise provocative questions.

Unfortunately, Moret’s new installation, “Speaking in Tongues”--at the Saddleback College Art Gallery in Mission Viejo through Friday--seems diffuse, unresolved and not particularly amenable to subtle interpretation.

The piece is a life-size wood-framed house of worship supported on carvings of watermelons. To approach this structure--perfumed with incense and resonant with fervent chanting--the visitor walks on an earth-strewn floor. Artificial doves and starfish and other objects are packed within the wire screening forming the walls of the structure. Just inside the entryway, an low altar covered with African print cloth supports a medley of objects: Communion wafers, horseshoes, cigars, a sea shell, candles, a small drum, devotional pictures.

Inside this church, a brief film, viewed through a fabric scrim, presents a fleeting group of images: the sea, an old painting of the slave trade, a black woman offering a creche to a white priest, a wooden African sculpture, a blazing (sacrificial?) fire, an elaborate headdress, black people being baptized by a white priest.

Moret, a black artist who was brought up both Baptist and Catholic in South Los Angeles, comes from African, Indian, Mexican and French stock. His juxtaposition of disparate objects and his contrast of white church leadership with black worshipers and African devotional practices are attempts to convey the diffuse cultural strains of African-American Christianity.

In her preface to the exhibit catalogue, Sherley Anne Williams, who teaches literature at UC San Diego, notes that black grass-roots Christianity incorporates elements of African spiritual traditions, such as hand-clapping and shouting, and the call-and-response rhythm of worship. In an interview printed in the catalogue, Moret says his dual religions meant “always trying to find a reason for the soulful outbursts in one church, while adjusting to the low, mournful songs in the cathedrals.”

Moret also makes less compelling, smaller works: portable “altars” packed into suitcases. These pieces mingle religious imagery with scenes of urban disaster, African sculpture, a quotation from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and imagery involving American racial themes (a burnt cross; the lurid cover of a pulp novel about life in the “Old South”; a children’s book illustration of a blond child in which the lips are replaced by those of a black person; a black couple with a symbol of lily-white suburban living: a white picket fence).

Despite its complex and unusual theme, “Speaking in Tongues” is frustrating because there doesn’t seem to be all that much content behind the immediate, sensory appeal of the cross-cultural sights and sounds and smells.

Although the piece is heavily dependent on the film for historical and cultural content, the film images are so sketchy that they convey only a general hint of the artist’s concerns. In the interview, for example, Moret mentions Santeria (a mystical Afro-Cuban religion involving animal sacrifice) but he doesn’t give puzzled viewers insights into Santeria’s allure or power or roots in the installation itself.