Truman’s at the heart of show

Harry S. Truman is an unlikely protagonist for a disorienting video plus a series of mixed-media paintings and sculptures by Mary Reid Kelley and Patrick Kelley. But he’s an inspired choice.

It’s the third show at Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects for the Kelleys, who are based in upstate New York. The setting of the video centerpiece is a submarine in the Pacific Ocean during the closing days of World War II, with the artists performing as characters in the video and photographs mounted in light boxes.

The 33rd president was the bridge between mammoth wars — one hot, the other cold. The terrifying dawn of the nuclear age, when weapons of unprecedented intensity were actually used against an enemy in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, quickly became the threat of global annihilation, which formed the grinding context of everyday life for the next two generations. These are artists who think big, while employing modest means.

Stylistically, the work assumes a contemporary form of epic poetry, as if the “Iliad’s” Homer, “Mahabharata’s” Vyasa or the unknown “Beowulf” author were a current feminist equipped with a video camera. (Toss in Woody Guthrie too.) Everything is rendered in black, white and gray — a cartoonish emulation of period photographs before color became the norm.

Charcoal animations by South African William Kentridge, colorless French Cubist paintings and the extreme stylization of German Expressionist cinema are