The notion of an unbridgeable divide between art and sports is so commonplace that it's startling to find a soccer-themed installation at Minneapolis College of Art and Design. Elegantly minimalist, the installation is the intriguing centerpiece of a lean and well-focused show on view through Nov. 8. Each of the five participants received a $10,000 grant from the Twin Cities-based Jerome Foundation to help underwrite a year of experimentation and development. Investing in young talent is always a risky enterprise, but well rewarded this year.

Stereotypes pin artists as scruffy slackers who wouldn't know a head-butt from a free throw. But here's Benjamin Reed incisively analyzing, in three dimensions, the final moments of several World Cup matches. He's mapped the play on large white boards, reminiscent of minimalist paintings, that are marked like soccer fields. Tiny plastic figures show the position of various players in the decisive action of, for example, the "1994 World Cup Group A Match: Colombia vs. United States 1:2 Death of Escobar." Tape lines indicate the movements of players, while ball action is traced by wires that arc above the field. The drama of the moment is compelling as Reed traces in a few taut lines the game's unexpected charges, feints and kicks.

Elsewhere in the gallery, a pair of oversized male mannequins in pinstriped suits mapping hypothetical plays on a chalkboard may be intended to suggest that the players are mere pawns in corporatized athletics, but that seems too cynical. Instead it seems more likely that Reed, a 2006 MFA grad from MCAD, has simply made smart connections between his personal passions for soccer and understated gestural art.

Barbara Claussen's reproductions of three traditional London phone booths are equally rewarding. The iconic red boxes with their curved tops and mullioned windows are imposing presences, but inviting too as a soothing voice repeatedly urges visitors to step inside. Doing so activates another recording in which male and female voices lay out the attractions and perils of "the System," which alternatively promises safety, punishment and rewards while also abusing its power, demanding loyalty and using "force when necessary." Seductive, cautionary, authoritarian and fearful, the voices enact a terse and effective bit of political theater in a phone booth.

Contemporary sexual politics is the subtext of Evan Baden's large color photos, which recast "sexting" as art material. One of the dubious achievements of technology is to take porn out of seedy theaters and turn it into just another do-it-yourself hobby to share with friends and strangers. Baden re-creates and most likely heightens the artistry of teen sex as flaunted in webcasts and social network sites. His elaborately staged and color-coordinated suburban settings feature teens -- mostly girls -- performing like porn stars. (MCAD has posted a nudes and sex warning.) Toeing a narrow line between documentary and staged imagery, Baden's photos are simultaneously fascinating and depressing.

Kirsten Peterson's small plastic models and plasticized images of a shed collapsing in a simulated earthquake are curious visualizations of scientific studies. And Lindsay Smith offers thoughtfully realized watercolor-gouache images of survivalists in a post-apocalypse world junked up with abandoned vehicles and bad weather. While not as dramatic as their Jerome colleagues, the work of both artists is nicely untainted by trendy cant.

Ends Nov. 8, free. 2501 Stevens Av. S., Mpls.

612-874-3700 or www.mcad.edu.

Franklin Art Works Former Minnesotan Rob Fischer, who now lives in Brooklyn, is launching Franklin's 10th-anniversary season with an ambitious installation that will be presented next month at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. Fischer has built an international career by constructing jerry-rigged objects -- boats, rooms -- that suggest rootlessness, impatience and dissolution. Here he's filled the main gallery and partially renovated theater with raw materials that have the unfinished quality of projects in the works. They include a vast wall construction made of abandoned gym flooring; light-boxes made of fluorescent fixtures and dimpled plastic crudely painted with swamp foliage or floorboard patterns; continuously projected films of northern Minnesota as seen from a moving car (asphalt, snow patches, brown woods, trailer homes, small towns); 3D abstractions on glass; and a faux pond with paintings (red, yellow, blue) curling in a corner.

While nothing in the show looks artful, it seems full of sly allusions to all sorts of 20th-century masters, from sets designed by Robert Rauschenberg for Merce Cunningham's dance performances to the striped paintings of Frank Stella and the 3D constructions of Charles Biederman. Odd but memorable. A smaller Franklin show features five amazingly subtle gray-on-black landscape prints by Keita Sugiura of forests, foliage and grasses.

Ends Oct. 31, free. 1021 E. Franklin Av., Mpls. 612-872-7494 or www.franklinartworks.org.

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