DOWNTOWN

John Michael’s miniature assemblages are kinky and ice cold. A naked Barbie doll decapitated and affixed to a cross? Surely there’s a less heavy-handed way to express one’s feelings of sexual alienation.

Housed in plexiglass boxes, these clinical little horror stories are crammed with enough creepy information to send a shiver down Hitchcock’s spine. All appearing to be trapped, tortured, in bondage or under the piercing gaze of a huge eyeball, such laughably Freudian elements as black rubber snakes, hooks, chains, hypodermics, plastic hands with Exacto-knife blades in place of nails, and shelves of severed, blindfolded dolls’ heads make a convincing case for celibacy. A few of these malevolent tableaux would be more than enough; that there are 30 of them jammed in one room goes far beyond overkill. The exhibition has the quality of a futuristic laboratory manned by a wicked scientist bent on inventing his own Barbarella and devising unthinkably twisted sexual practices. (James Turcotte, 3517 W. 6th St., to Sept. 28.)