Art Review

Time Travels: Imagine what it would be like to be a genie who lived in a lava lamp, and you’ll have an idea of how it feels to visit Jennifer Steinkamp’s trippy installation at ACME Gallery. Composed of three body-dwarfing laserdisc projections and two tracks of ambient music (composed and recorded by Jimmy Johnson’s one-man techno band, “Grain”), this mind-bending piece of participatory theater transforms a darkened gallery into an accessible stage on which fantastic things happen.

Titled “A Sailor’s Life Is a Life for Me,” Steinkamp’s light-and-sound show sets viewers adrift in a liquid dream. On three walls, stylized squiggles that resemble a kid’s drawing of the high seas flow horizontally, vertically or spin in circles--making you feel pleasantly disoriented or unbelievably seasick. These computer-generated hills and valleys appear to be handmade drawings of hundreds of glistening mounds of Jello that have taken on a life of their own to jiggle past one another.

There’s no place to hide and no room for wallflowers. No matter where you stand, your silhouette is cast on one of two walls. Before long, you find yourself getting into the swing of things--and feeling pretty good about dancing with yourself.

As soon as this happens, the gallery’s rigid architecture dissolves into queasy fields of undulating color. Space expands and contracts, as if the world were breathing deeply. And time slips by swiftly, as your awareness of its passage drifts away.

Before you know it, you’re part of a social hallucination--an actor in a drama that’s beyond your control. Simultaneously sublime and sickening, Steinkamp’s giddy installation invites everyone to get in over their heads.

(If you can’t make it to the show during regular business hours, a silent version is visible from sunset to sunrise in the gallery’s front window, right across the street from Sizzler.)

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* ACME Gallery, 6150 Wilshire Blvd., (213) 857-5942, through May 16. Closed Sundays and Mondays.