Walls, benches and dark and illuminated spaces...

SAN DIEGO — Walls, benches and dark and illuminated spaces commonly articulate the arenas of everyday activity. Such architectural elements are so basic as to rarely call attention to themselves when combined to form offices, homes or other functional structures.

In Jim Skalman’s “Containment,” the inaugural offering of the La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art’s downtown gallery (838 G St., second floor), these elements are exaggerated and arranged to create an emotionally evocative environment infused with external associations, a space rich with memory and meaning.

Darkness pervades most of the space, and only two narrow bands of electric light allow recognition of the room’s configuration. Painfully narrow slat benches rest against each of its four walls, and two rows of posts force a distinction between outer aisles and an inner rectangular space.

The aisles’ low ceilings and uninviting benches urge the body toward the center of the room, a pull reinforced by the mysterious black hole in place of this area’s ceiling. Once standing in this central space, one feels an inescapable pull upward. Ascension describes the sensation as aptly as Skalman’s title, “Containment.” Having excised the center of the ceiling and framed the void, Skalman has filled its mysterious, infinite space with the faint sounds of Gregorian chants. The recording filters through the space, Muzak-style, from an invisible source, fading in and out between the waves of traffic noise from the street below.

Skalman’s environment vaguely recalls structural aspects of Greek temples and basilicas, with its separation of outer and inner spaces. The contrast between space of known dimensions and configuration and that of unknown--and perhaps unknowable--proportions suggests the distinction between human and superhuman, or divine.

Skalman, a local artist, has succeeded in imparting a strong emotional, spiritual dimension to an environment constructed with simplicity and elegant restraint. That the experience is so affecting only makes it more tragic to re-enter the functional world of spaces and structures whose potential to shape experience and alter perceptions has never been considered, much less realized.

“Containment” continues through Feb. 7.

Leslie Nemour’s recent work interweaves personal notes and general observations about romantic attachments and tensions between the sexes.

Collectively titled “Irresistible Attraction,” the paintings on view at Sushi (852 8th Ave.) are each paired with an object suspended from the ceiling by a piece of string. The more explicit of these combinations prove quite effective, a hanging hourglass and stopwatch adding the pressure of time and the biological clock to the insistent magnetic force that Nemour shows pulling men and women together.

Nemour, who lives and teaches in San Diego, mixes metaphoric and literal imagery to examine the dynamics of interpersonal relationships.

In “The Gravity of the Situation,” a pendulum swings over three small, ovoid masses, embracing them in a common fate, a tension suggestive of that binding a love triangle. The concise forms and primarily mild palette lend the painting an understated urgency fitting of its subject. In “ . . . Like a Magnet,” Nemour depicts a suave, well-dressed man calmly swinging a pendulum in his right hand. A larger pendulum orbits around him, making him the center of a gravitational force that has attracted various women, whose portraits frame him on three sides.

Nemour seems to derive her depictions of men and women from the stereotyped models in soap operas, movies and romance novels. Couples kiss and embrace with a stylized passion and a preoccupation with dreamy expressions and perfect postures.

Women, according to their traditional role, are seen as irresistibly drawn, driven by blind impulse, while men appear smooth and outwardly restrained. Only they are shown with pendulum in hand, controlling the course of its swing.

Nemour’s work possesses a strong conceptual and thematic coherence, as well as a tremendous relevance to real human concerns. Its only weakness is an occasional slack composition, marked by diffused space lazily and ineffectually pieced together by arbitrary patches of brush strokes.

The show remains on view through Jan. 30.