On the sort of sweat-lock afternoon when Miami feels like a junkyard on the hot bottom of the Earth, Clifton Childree -- installation artist, experimental filmmaker and devotee of decay -- is dressed in a paint-splattered T-shirt and running his hands lovingly over the turn-of-the-century Singer sewing machine set to be put to novel use for his DREAM-CUM-TRU exhibition opening Saturday night at Locust Projects in Wynwood.

''What I wanted to do with this installation is create the look of an abandoned carnival,'' Childree says. ``There'll be sand all over the floor, with rotting wood and vines wrapped around the booths, and the sewing machine is part of the Old Kipper's Widow ride.''

A string from the sewing machine extends to a sail above: the widow, made of wood, plaster and mannequin parts, wears a black mourning dress in honor of her husband, a captain lost at sea. If a visitor sits in a nearby chair, the widow moves forward, as if she's about to mount him for sex. But to Childree, the tableau is all about the solid skills of old-school tradesmen.

''Look at the craftsmanship on this Singer,'' he says. ''A modern sex machine in this piece would have been mass-produced, cheap and shoddy.'' This is Childree's first big exhibition, the first to combine his sculpture and films and an interesting moment for the 37-year-old artist, a former skateboarder and surfer who grew up in Plantation.

NOTHING THERE

''There was nothing there in the suburbs, just nothing,'' he says.

Childree skipped college in favor of surfing around the world, dabbled with a film studies program in Portland, Ore., then brought that city's DIY (Do It Yourself) aesthetic to Fort Lauderdale in the early 1990s, opening the concert hall/art cinema Theatre 1225 and The Mudhouse, featuring punk bands and coffee.

''It was a fun time until the guy at the door got shot and killed,'' Childree says. ``One kid was mad the club was charging a two-dollar cover charge.''

As a little boy, Childree made Super8, vampires-in-Plantation shorts like The Red Caped Killer and eventually moved on to a series of silent post-Cabinet of Dr. Caligari films with a give- me-that-old-time-perversion-and-horror sensibility. His artistic wellsprings include his grandfather's photograph of a man with elephantiasis, horror myths and general ``weird stuff that people have told me over the years that sticks in my mind.''

Childree lives in an antique-adorned house (''Things that have been around a long time emanate a certain energy'') near Miami's Design District and builds elaborate sets for his films in the back yard. His collection of props, many scavenged from dump sites, includes gramophones, ancient toilets, gumball machines, dugout canoes, whaling harpoons and headboards with Victorian scroll work.

He doesn't have a gallery, though 2003's film The Flew was saluted by the scholarly magazine Cahiers du Cinema, and Paris-based E.D. Distribution now carries his work. In 2006, Miami Light Project and the then-Carnival Center for the Performing Arts commissioned his film Something Awful for the Here and Now Festival.

Even in this age of what-can-we-transgress-now? art, Childree's dark work is profoundly scatological.

In Something Awful, for instance, Childree plays a Victorian-era fisherman who brings a severed bloomers-clad buttock from his lobster trap to the local bar, where it promptly starts shooting mock feces at patrons: ''After we screened Something Awful,'' Childree recalls with a chuckle. ``No one from the Carnival Center said a word.''

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