Garth Claassen's drawings nearly overpower the walls at the Boise Art Museum's smallest gallery. They are rendered with bold, dark strokes that create a world filled with imposing figures of formidable shape and size but that are clearly powerless to master the world they've constructed. They even overtly undermine its success.

"They are people who've gotten themselves into some kind of predicament," Claassen said. "People who are trying to control this and control that, working so very hard at something that may not have a real point and probably isn't a good idea."

That theme fuels Claassen's series "Bloated Floaters, Snouted Sappers and the Defense of Empire," now on exhibit at the Boise Art Museum.

The work is stacked along the gallery walls, unframed and held by delicate pins. The nakedness of each piece gives it more weight. This idea for displaying the work came to curator Sandy Harthorne on a visit to Claassen's studio at the College of Idaho, where he teaches art. Its walls were papered with his black and white drawings as he worked.

It seemed the right way to display the work without framing each of the 85 drawings. There also are nine sketch books.

Claassen's work tends to have a socio-political bent to it, but the pieces in the exhibit are less topical, more thoughtful about behavior.

"You look at history, these series of attempts to keep these people penned in or keep those people out, to monitor this or construct that. It's all done with great energy. There's a lot of action and dust and everything, and nothing happens," he said.

In his earlier series "The Heavy Dancers," for which he won his second Idaho Commission on the Arts Fellowship in Visual Arts, this one for 2009, was inspired by the war in Iraq. His giant figures stomp through landscapes that overpower them as they carry ambiguous black boxes - some covering their heads - going nowhere.

Claassen grew up in South Africa and left for graduate school in Indiana in the 1980s. He immigrated to the United States with his family, settling in Caldwell in 1993, where he has taught drawing and painting since 1994 at the College of Idaho.

In this latest series, long fences snake through arid landscapes. Bulging men toil in futility. The sappers (British slang for a military engineer) wear metal "snouts," based on the idea of a watering can that covers their faces and stops them from seeing what they are doing. Still, they work to build a fortification and infrastructure, only to be literally blown away by a puff of air - some take flight like a human dirigible airship.

"In earlier years, the war had something to do with it but now that's not so much anymore," he said. "There is somewhat of a topical reference but it is also a reference to ideas of people insisting on borders, and the futility of trying to control every single thing, then finding yourself in a predicament where you are tangled up, stuck in pipes and all sorts of things. It has resonance to me of a wider experience."