Lectures on biology, evolution and the human condition — along with jittery digital projections, neurotic anthropological theories and cartoon crocodiles — will turn Harry Wood art gallery on the Tempe campus into a theater throughout the week.

Wearing a beige corduroy jacket and red bowtie, the artist began his first lecture Monday night by introducing himself in front of about 115 audience members: “My name is Arius, and I’m an artist, and I guess I’m an ape as well.”

“The Anxieties of Apes and Artists” is a nightly performance series by art graduate student Arius Elvikis, with new lectures every night until Thursday. The genre-bending art installment features Elvikis alone on stage, frenetically jumping between scientific topics that roughly coincide with the shaky cartoon animation slideshow behind him.

The animation, hand-drawn by Elvikis through a digital stylus into his computer, looks more like a comic strip than a PowerPoint presentation. Elvikis said this and the nearly unscripted but well-researched lectures try to bring “The Anxieties of Apes and Artists” halfway between entertaining and educational.

“By dressing up like professor and [presenting a] lecture, that’s an academic thing,” he said. “But with my cartooning background, I had to make it funny. If I didn’t make it funny, some of this stuff would be really depressing.”

Elvikis said the overall meaning of “The Anxieties of Apes and Artists” was to examine the very real concerns he has about the way he and others choose to live their lives, and the assumptions people make about what it means to be a human being.

“It’s not ignorance or evil, but there’s some questions we just don’t ask,” he said. “These are things I’m actually anxious about, and I amp it up as part of the performance.”

The resulting performances are a merging of inspirations, he said, combining a love of animation, public speaking and what he called “cathartic scientific research.”

At the opening reception Monday, Elvikis began his frenetic series by discussing mankind’s place in the animal kingdom. Tuesday’s lecture, “Sex Chose Art,” addressed sexual selection as the potential root of creativity. On Wednesday, Elvikis will explore the apocalypse, and Thursday’s lecture will analyze the futility of progress through “a bizarre encounter with a drunken moose.”

Elvikis said the performances rapidly present the information he wants to cover in an attempt to engage the audience without being bogged down with creating a traditional art object.

“I don’t have time to buff metal,” Elvikis said.

Nic Wiesinger, also an intermedia art graduate student, said the exhibition works well because it strays away from the traditional gallery format where “art is on walls and pedestals.”

“Some things are really difficult to express unless they’re told in a ‘performative’ sort of way,” he said. “I think it would be near impossible to equate the scope of what he did [within] a two-dimensional object, or [any single] object itself.”

Wiesinger said Elvikis succeeded in explaining complex sociological issues in an easily relatable way with his tongue-in-cheek public-speaking style.

Benjamin Rogers, a painting graduate student who attended Monday night’s opening lecture, said transforming the gallery space into a theater-style exhibition activated the performance and allowed Elvikis to communicate more directly with the audience than an artist is usually allowed.

“Normally, the idea in visual art is you have to be a little more subtle,” he said. “Typically, when art just says something, it comes off as heavy-handed, but it’s not the case [in this performance].”

Rogers said the exhibition’s temporary nature and Elvikis’ storytelling blurred the lines between information, animation and performance.

“The question is, ‘What part is the art?’” he said. “I guess it’s really all of them.”

Perhaps the man in the beige corduroy and red bowtie best described the message of his performances while quoting a cartoon dragonfly consoling a cartoon man-king in Monday’s lecture:

“There’s one thing that you can do that no other animals can: Tell stories … That’s one thing that you do the best.”

Reach the reporter at trabens@asu.edu.