Santa Monica

George Stone’s multimedia pieces are as engaging as a side show, toying with the viewer’s expectations and honing sensory alertness to a high pitch. Amble up to a white marble chair on a platform and discover--sheepishly, by touch--that it’s made of ice (rigged with Freon and refrigerator coils). Peer at the wall behind the platform and find yourself lying in wait for a flickering batch of subliminal images. Was that a Boy Scout? And maybe a homburg-wearing man on a street and a couple sitting at a table?

“In the Line of Fire (Civilized, Informed, Entertained)” involves a videotape that slowly pans over Stone’s body and records him shooting a gun. At the appropriate millisecond later, a smoking hole punctures a canvas on the opposite wall. The ceiling-mounted mike on a long boom in “Spirit Finder” picks up an empty, droning sound each time it swings by a small pile of bones and white debris.

“Fault Line” has 64 feet worth of glass panels that are tilted and thrust forward in undulating waves by a mechanism that creaks rhythmically as it proffers and retracts the panels. Behind them are neat rows of chalked-in data of a civic nature (population trends, local government salaries). On the panels, coyly written on the inside so as to be illegible to the viewer, is supposedly a history of California. But never mind. As in the other pieces, the visceral power of the thing is the main event. (Meyers/Bloom Gallery, 2112 Broadway, Santa Monica, to Aug. 6.)