ELECTRIC AVE.

Looking at Matthew McCaslin’s witty, deadpan sculptures at the Orange County Museum of Art, you realize they could only be made by someone steeped from childhood in commercial TV’s blend of monotony and sensory overload.

Not to mention the suburban basement “rec room” culture that invariably features a jumble of discarded electronic equipment in one dark corner.

Who else would think to make a postmodern kaleidoscope with four TV monitors, each showing the same ordinary scene of cars driving on a highway?

By grouping the monitors so each faces a different way--making the videos run in each compass direction--he turns this utterly boring image into a mesmerizing abstract pattern he calls “Intersection.”

McCaslin riffs on some famous modern art styles in his work and shares the casual, clutter-embracing aesthetic of some of his peers.

But day jobs in construction and a (formerly psychedelic drug-driven) fascination with alternative worlds have given him a unique perspective. Underlying the wry visual appeal of this work is a subtle sci-fi twist: Everything--the cables, the lightbulbs, the TV sets--would be meaningless without the unseen forces of electricity.

What he does with his unusual materials tends to be the inverse of what you’d expect. He turns bulky lengths of electrical cable into loopy, scribbled shapes that have the handmade quality of drawings. Conversely, he makes natural imagery (flowers, sunsets) appear artificial by electronically manipulating time sequences.

Shiny lengths of cables form the drooping outlines of “Quilt,” which hangs on the wall. Humorously evoking the geometric patterning of folk art that attracted art-world attention in the 1960s, McCaslin punctuates the cables with tidy rows of four-outlet electric plates.

Other pieces from the early ‘90s (“48 Hours in a Day,” “Places I’ve Been”) contain wild tangles of wires, evocative of both the gestural qualities of Action Painting and of activity-oriented “process” art of the ‘60s.

Clocks that often hang askew and never tell the right time--a rather gimmicky touch--signal McCaslin’s desire to subvert viewers’ expectations of technology. On a video of a flower bursting into bloom--part of a piece called “Where Was I?”--a digital clock ticks off the seconds, as if measuring actual elapsed time from bud to blossom.

Other pieces have a more open-ended, fanciful quality. “A Place in Time” is a tidy little tableau that includes a bar of fluorescent light (indelibly associated with Dan Flavin’s sculptures of the ‘60s), the cheesy Vangelis theme from the 1981 film “Chariots of Fire” and two oscillating fans.

The fans slowly turning from side to side, the radiant light bar and the pumped-up music lend a weird sense of occasion to this little shrine for a broken black-and-white TV with a “snowy” screen, whose “place in time” the other elements of the piece firmly anchor.

In his most playful mode, McCaslin plots the simplest possible design for a conduit connecting a light fixture and a dimmer to an outlet box. “Path of Least Resistance” looks like a diagram from the chapter on electricity in a junior-high science text.

This minimalist rigor breaks down completely with an orange extension cord that lazily meanders over the gallery floor before it plugs into a distant outlet. The “path of least resistance” for electrical current is one thing, but for humans, it may mean simply not having to think too hard.

During the past few years, the artist has worked more with manipulated real-world imagery. Some of these pieces are one-liners, for all their charm. In “Alaska,” out-of-synch videotapes on eight TV sets show the sun suddenly set--plop!--with a mixture of Technicolor splendor and comic haste.

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McCaslin’s most intriguing recent pieces have a larger frame of reference. In “Happy Valley Sunday,” several TVs casually scattered on the floor loop the same sequence: people walking through a revolving door and well-dressed crowds streaming purposefully through a corridor in a corporate building.

Another TV shows a surfer riding the waves. A large monitor zeros in on machines stamping out hamburger patties onto separate pieces of waxed paper. There’s also a scattering of utilitarian light fixtures and a tangle of wires.

In another era, the imagery might be expected to add up to a condemnation of a consumer society’s rote activities and herd mentality. The title, after all, recalls the Monkees’ hit “Pleasant Valley Sunday,” about a comfortable suburb in “status symbol land,” which the singer longs to escape.

But McCaslin’s work doesn’t wag its finger--at least not in the way you’d expect. His view of a technology-controlled universe implicates everyone, even the seemingly carefree surfer. We’re all just as hooked into this world as the TV sets themselves, mesmerized by whatever electronic images flit over a screen.

Of course, his own works couldn’t exist without technology. When McCaslin plugs them in at a museum here or abroad (three related exhibitions of his work are at German and Swiss institutions), he’s playing his own eccentric little role in an infrastructure that none of us can escape.

* “Matthew McCaslin: Works-Sites” continues through Sept. 13 at the Orange County Museum of Art, 850 San Clemente Drive, Newport Beach. Tuesday-Sunday, 11 a.m.-5 p.m. $5; seniors and students, $4; free for 16 and younger; free for everyone on Tuesdays. (949) 759-1122.