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By Dan Leone

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MARCH AND APRIL will be busy months at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, where four shows are going on, each focusing on a different aspect of the contemporary art scene. "Slowdive: Sculpture and Performance in Real Time" is a multiartist, multimedia exhibition that explores time-based art, performance, and the movement of bodies through space. Featured artists include Nao Bustamante, Cliff Hengst, Will Rogan, and Bruce Tomb. "Elder Arts 2002" combines the 11th annual "Art with Elders Exhibition" (art by Bay Area nursing home residents) and "Elder Arts Celebrations," which showcases works by senior alumni, faculty, and students at Bay Area art-teaching institutions. "Guide to Trust No. 2" features paintings, sculptures, photos, and videos by more than 40 artists who were asked to respond to Guide, an experimental novel by writer and Center for the Arts artist in residence Dennis Cooper. "Building Project," a video installation by Shannon Kennedy, is the last of the four shows and definitely the standout work of the entire exhibition. Projected onto a theater-size movie screen, it's a Jules Verne-type journey to the center of the Center for the Arts building. Kennedy used an endoscope – a medical imaging device usually used during surgery – to film the insides of the center's pipes and air ducts, revealing a hidden world of dripping goop, crusty stuff, dust, and mold hidden behind the gallery's clean white walls. If you didn't know any different, you might think you were looking at pictures of the internal organs of a living, breathing animal. The sound effects are creepy too, combining pings and clanks with gloopy fluid noises. Kennedy's intimate, invasive (and vaguely gross) view of the Center for the Arts is not a pretty picture, but it will certainly make you think of the structure you're standing in as much more than an inanimate box.

Tues.-Sun., 11 a.m.-6 p.m. (first Thurs., 11 a.m.-8 p.m.), 701 Mission, S.F. $6, $3 seniors, students, and youths, free for members (free first Tues.). (415) 978-ARTS. (Lindsey Westbrook)