Breakfast of the Manipulated : Art: ‘Cereal Killers’ explores the corporate desire to conquer young minds, while a second exhibition also has something to say, albeit more vaguely, about vulnerability.

SAN DIEGO —  Two chilling new installations at the Rita Dean Gallery downtown have something to say about innocence and violence.

One addresses the tragic societal consequences of advertising designed to permeate the home, the mind and one’s own objects of desire. The other deals obliquely with conflicting images of women as both powerful and vulnerable.

Though both installations could benefit from a more richly layered, nuanced treatment, they are affecting and provocative.

James Healy and Pawel Tulin’s collaborative work, “Cereal Killers: The Art of Corporate Lebensraum,” contains in its title alone all of the punning humor and horror that unfold slightly more gradually in the installation.

A row of common breakfast cereal boxes is mounted across one wall. On the opposite wall, a grid of black and white photo blowups portray 18 men and women, presumably killers, against a uniform backdrop of spiraling black and white stripes. Eye-level mirrors hang on the wall that connects those two, and black and white backdrops hang opposite the mirrors. Viewers, then, who stop to look at their reflections will see their own faces at the heart of the same psycho swirl that sets off the portraits of the criminals.

Though the murderers are not identified as such, the nature of their crimes is suggested by small montaged images of bound bodies, bloodied corpses and battered heads. Tucked into the shadowed areas of their portraits, these visions of victims literally shape the criminals’ identities. A string of phrases stenciled on the floor--barely legible in the faintest of grays--does less to lend coherence to the installation than the show’s title, for the work’s primary impact lies in the punning, startling connection between cereal and serial killers.

If that link seems simply humorous or gratuitous at first, the use of the term Lebensraum in the title makes clear just how serious and threatening the artists believe that link to be. In the late 1930s, Germany justified its aggressive push into Eastern Europe with the need for more Lebensraum , literally “living space.” This violent greed for land sparked no less a cataclysm than the second world war.

Healy and Tulin make the point here, dramatically yet somewhat simplistically, that American corporations have the same unbridled hunger for expansion--but the territory they strive to occupy is the human mind. Once that pliable terrain is conquered, the makers of sugar-laden cereals simply let their products take their course, triggering everything from addiction to asocial, even violent behavior.

If it sounds as if the artists believe in a conspiracy, they do. “The Cereal Box Conspiracy Against the Developing Mind,” an essay by Michelle Handelman and Monte Cazazza, served as the inspiration for the current show. What Healy and Tulin have done is to visualize and extend the authors’ argument that food manufacturers are turning children into monsters, seducing them into a deadly consumerist trap right at the breakfast table.

This show has none of the sophistication of behaviorist theory, or the subtlety of a more involving work of art, but it does call much-needed attention to a highly problematic and real issue of our over-commercialized culture. One has only to think back to the so-called “Twinkie Defense” used in the murder of San Francisco Mayor George Moscone to realize just how real the issue is.

If Healy and Tulin’s installation is the visualization of a theory, Leslie Samuels’ accompanying installation is the vision of a vague dream. Though a powerful, visceral experience, it only hints at a more substantive cause.

“Silent Death, Invisible Weapons” occupies a small, separate room entered through a doorway of heavy, draped velvet. Instantly, the space identifies itself as a metaphor for the co-mingling of life and death. Ten small, live finches sweep down from the netted ceiling onto one of two glass shelves covered with odd, wax-encased glass bottles filled with berries, shells, peppers, keys and shell casings. A horse skeleton arranged like a human on its back with legs spread lies embedded in fine sand on the gallery floor. Bird seed fills its chest cavity and a small dish of water nestles in its pelvis. The birds, fluttering impatiently from shelf to ceiling, seem to be trapped innocents, but, like vultures, they feed off another creature’s carcass.

Though the intent of Samuels’ installation remains elusive, it has a mesmerizing potency: It is a charged space, rich with suggestions of animist ritual and subtle sources of power.

* Rita Dean Gallery, 544 6th Ave., through Sept. 12. Gallery hours are 11 a.m.-6 p.m. Monday-Thursday, 11 a.m.-10 p.m. Friday-Saturday.

In Stephen Curry’s magnificent paintings now on view at Java Coffeehouse/Gallery, life is slowed, magnified, monumentalized. Pears, shallots, figs or chestnuts float and huddle, they rock and they rest. These are still-lifes that refuse to be still. Both the objects in them and the luminous atmosphere around them feel animate. They are equal players in an unnamed but vital drama.

Mortality has long been the metaphorical message of still-lifes: Ripe fruit and luxurious blossoms are preserved in paint before they make the inevitable passage through decay to death and disappearance. Curry, a young San Diego painter, builds upon this tradition in his lushly painted studies of objects of transient beauty.

In “Caravaggio’s Basket of Fruit,” he recasts a classic still-life, but shows the apples and leaves as if shedding some of their earthly weight and dissolving into the dense gold atmosphere around them. At one moment the leaves are twisting, balletic silhouettes; at another, they are fading, transparent reminders of a former life.

Like Donald Sultan’s monumental images of lemons, Curry’s paintings have a significance and presence that belie their modest subject matter. Their compositions are relatively simple, but Curry’s tremendously rich palette and elegant style lend even the most plain arrangements a narrative spark.

A huge pear hovers in one painting, for instance, like a dark earthen mass eclipsing the blushing light behind it. In another, a cluster of thorny stems bends and submits to the power emitted by a densely painted patch of burnt red nearby.

Curry’s light is the light of fire, mist, dawn. It is a sublime light, transient and fluid as the time it fills and the objects it illuminates. It is a light that has spiritual potential and not just functional power. Curry’s first one-person show in San Diego is an inspiration.

* Java Coffeehouse/Gallery, 837 G St., through Sept. 6. Hours are 8 a.m.-2 a.m. weekdays, 10 a.m-2 a.m Saturday-Sunday.