By Glen Helfand

WHAT DOES THE U.S. version of globalism look like? Once upon a time it was envisioned as a sturdy melting pot, but the concept is currently a bit more difficult to visualize. Instead of distinct iconography, contemporary pictures spring to mind: sushi at SBC Park; the anonymous employees at an outsourced call-in center; Fremont residents getting worked up about international flags at their Independence Day parade. There are interesting angles to each of these scenarios, and they all have a way of eroding commonly held beliefs about origin.

The double-bill exhibition Busted: New Works by Felipe Dulzaides and Robin Rhode gingerly approaches globalism and issues of origin. It spotlights and unites a pair of artists who've left politically charged homelands – Cuba and South Africa, respectively – to become roaming world citizens. The exhibition, curated by Clara Kim (formerly of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and currently working at Los Angeles's Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater), responds to dislocation with a wandering spirit, applying a performative approach to complicated issues. Dulzaides and Rhode use static and moving images to tell stories about the contemporary condition of uprootedness. Busted's title might allude to a brash deconstruction of identity. Yet what makes this show interesting is its tone, which is more playful (however obliquely) than didactic when addressing the balkanized positions so pervasive in modern life.

Dulzaides works from a nomadic position, filtering a range of locations through a wry lens and a deadpan wit. He attended the San Francisco Art Institute, and while he has strong Bay Area connections, he resides in more affordable Phoenix. For this exhibition, he presents a dual slide-projection piece, Bust Bustling (2002-04), in which he randomly juxtaposes photographs of pedestals and public sculptures and statues in U.S., European, and Cuban locales. The image sequence often results in absurd pairings. The scale of the foundations and the deified social heroes above them are never quite in synch.

Not much bigger than a letter-size sheet of paper when projected, Dulzaides's slides hint at the humble quality of a vacation slide show, albeit an uncommonly entertaining one. Indeed, these images come from the artist's own travels, and the standard forms of the granite foundations and the bronze or stone sculptures relate to international conventions of form. Dulzaides consciously uses slide projectors as a way to point out the projection of ideas.

The hardware also plays a role in his new video installation, Big Surf. Filmed at a faux-ocean water park in landlocked Phoenix, the piece depicts boogie boarders of various ethnicities riding artificial waves in front of a luridly colored sunset backdrop. Scenes in which the camera follows various participants – kids, attractive couples – recall the narrative relationships and connections of a (less shticky) Robert Altman film. The subjects are always shot from above, as though the artist is secretly surveying the action. Fittingly, the footage is projected through a toppled sculpture: a lifeguard tower constructed from raw wood. The video projector shoots images through a hole cut into the lifeguard chair (an outhouse reference that crops up again in the nearby photo piece A Hole in a Lookout Chair). Surveillance and excrement are connected in an unresolved manner, yet the piece is oddly entertaining.

So is Rhode's more formally structured video projection, an untitled piece in which the artist, seen only from behind, creates graffiti that slowly disappears. (The Berlin-based Rhode uses a brick wall at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, where he was an artist in residence.) The performance-art trope is that Rhode sprays white lines in minimalist grid formations and that what seems like spray paint is actually foaming glass cleaner that evaporates as the artist stands still. Rhode, whose work has been getting international attention, generates a low-tech effect similar to fast-motion photography while subverting prejudiced expectations about the identity of an African man with a spray can. How do we reconcile that his action is in the international art language of minimalism, and that it's rendered in a disappearing cleanser?

In two new sequential works, both involving a series of photos, Rhode creates narrative illustrations. Stacked Drawings (2004), set in the rubble of a building, alludes to gestural drawing and action painting with a trompe l'oeil result that suggests Donald Judd boxes installed in a coal mine. A Cloud of Dust (2004) depicts a giant wad of paper in an empty room – it resembles an expanding and ultimately vanishing cloud. The black-and-white 8-by-10-inch photographs refer to Eadweard Muybridge's motion studies, or perhaps to silent film, yet they're not particularly commanding. Even so, Rhode, like Dulzaides, often touches on salient personal and international issues. In the work of both artists, we face the fact that every action, image, and flag contains different meanings, depending on who's looking.

'Busted: New Works by Felipe Dulzaides and Robin Rhode' is on display through July 24. Tues.-Sat., noon-6 p.m., New Langton Arts, 1246 Folsom, S.F. Free. (415) 626-5416, www.newlangtonarts.org.