ART REVIEW : Performance Pieces Mar Exhibit of Robert Stivers Photos : His best work on view in Laguna is his simplest, while he sometimes puts too much stock in mannered poses and set-ups.

What mysteries can you evoke in a photograph of a clay-slathered nude body? What if it’s wrapped in a layer of plastic instead? Or suppose you posed a nude woman with an antler protruding from her head?

Robert Stivers, whose experiments in this vein are at BC Space in Laguna Beach (through May 7), came to photography relatively late in life. After graduating from UC Irvine as a history major, he spent eight years in New York, where he danced briefly with the Joffrey Ballet, and then tried his hand at dance administration.

In 1987, at the age of 34, he returned to the creative side of the arts after taking a UCLA Extension workshop with noted photographer JoAnn Callis.

Stivers’ dance background comes through clearly in the innate theatricality of his work and its concern with the expressive potential of the body. Adept at lighting his subjects, most of whom are dancers and actors, he is equally handy at coaxing out a range of velvety blacks in his silver gelatin and platinum prints.

Still feeling his way, Stivers sometimes puts too much stock in mannered poses and set-ups. In “Clay Series (Man Holding Stone)”--an impassive man whose head is covered with dried clay--the photographer seems to be trying to give Richard Avedon’s confrontational photography of the early ‘80s a quasi-mystical Men’s Movement spin. But this faux primitif image is as vacuous as a fashion magazine layout, revealing no inner life.

While an artist with a cooler sensibility might profit from this stylishly self-conscious approach, it makes Stivers’ earnest attempts at psychological discovery come across as labored and obvious.

Self-portraits in which Stivers lies on a bed of nails, crouches in the midst of a coiled length of garden hose and wears a strait-jacket are all performances .

This work isn’t really convincing on an emotional level, yet its evident sincerity precludes understanding it as an acknowledgment of audience complicity in the game of theatrical illusion.

The best photograph in the show is one of the simplest: a self-portrait in which Stivers, dressed in a pajama top, appears to be sleeping on his side at the luminous center of a large body of water.

At once peaceful and unsettling, the image brings to mind some of the qualities associated with sleep (isolation, peacefulness, vulnerability) as well as the liquid environment of the fetus. Stivers’ deadpan mournfulness recalls silent-movie actor Buster Keaton--a connection that makes the image seem more ironic and distanced, and helps remove it from the banalities of confessional art.

Images by Stivers in which the sitter’s face is turned away or obscured tend to seem more assured, probably because the body becomes a plastic object stripped of obvious clues to personality and psychology.

In one photograph, a woman’s head is wrapped in a bandage that spills a lush fall of hair between her bare breasts. The mixture of eroticism and repression remains tantalizingly unresolved.

Stivers’ showmanship works most handily in “Still Life,” a photograph of a trio of what initially appear to be small objects set on a wooden surface: an egg-shaped stone, a coil of metal chains and a fall of hair apparently suspended in air.

In fact, the hair cascades down the body of a woman (whose foot can be seen if you look closely), obliging the viewer to recalculate the scale of the other objects. Like the children’s game, “Rock, Scissors, Paper,” the trio of objects implies a power struggle. The woman is the sexual center--but doubtless not the power center--of this tiny universe.

* Photographs by Robert Stivers remain through May 7 at BC Space, 235 Forest Ave., Laguna Beach. Hours: 1:30-5:30 p.m. Tuesdays through Fridays. Free. (714) 497-1880.