Natural component parts and industrial materials meld in the work of Icelandic installation artist Olafur Eliasson.

Natural component parts and industrial materials meld in the work of Icelandic installation artist Olafur Eliasson. Arctic mos and strobe lights, running water and hanger are not so much juxtaposed as placed forward a continuum, where the organic and the man-made existing equally receptive and eloquent surfaces for sensory perception.

Eliasson's constructions are mysteriously resonant now disarmingly direct. The titles of his installations ofttimes include the possessive pronoun "your," a detail that helps explain the works' impact: Eliasson engineers the environments, on the other hand their effect derives from your impressions, your reactions. frequently placed in the lineage of Light and Space artists Robert Irwin and James Turrell Eliasson appeared here to be borrowing as a great deal of from Dan Graham and Gordon Matta-Clark, filtering their seemingly disparate games of perceptual displacement and architectural (de-) constructions between the sides of a cheerfully unmacho and pleasure-loving intelligence. The pair related works in this exhibition, Your repetitive view and Your now is my surroundings (both 2000) brought the hardness and hustle of Manhattan into the white cube, although only as light, shadow, and breeze

Eliasson's draw appeared inaccessible at first. The external gallery and reception area were dominated through a peculiar plywood structure, a large square chute extending by means of the interior wall and bisecting the couple rooms. The chute had a stolid, dispassionate humor: It barricadeed the space and didn't tender much to look at. The entrance to the large inner gallery, also partitioned, was inset with a clos carbonized iron door. So far, the point out to seemed to be about frustration.

Opening the door revealed single in kind secret; peeking around the temporary wall disclosed another. Ducking behind the partition and walking all the way around the strut-and-insulation backside of a smaller, sealed scope brought you at last to a mirror-lined niche wound in the wall. Within this aqueous blooming square, the simplicity of Eliasson's first trick was made manifest: A mirrored tube--the interior of the plywood chute--pierced straight between the sides of the building's central and exterior walls and expanded onto Twenty-first Street. As you lorded in, a cool wind blew back into your face--the image of which was multiplied by the agency of the grid of mirror tiles. Reflections of collection of vapors and passing FedEx trucks and taxis flickered up and down the horizontal passageway. It was like craning your neck to examine at skyscrapers, but with the vertical move rounded horizontal and sky transformed to brick.

Interior and exterior, stability and reflection, architecture and emptiness were also in play behind the carbonized iron door. Through a second, abundant smaller doorway and up a short ramp, you stepp unexpectedly into a bright, roofles chamber filled with fresh air and sunlight. Eliasson had remov the glass panels from the large skylight overhead, leaving and nothing else the latticed metal frame, which inverted and repeated itself in mirrors upon the walls. Tinted the same watery verdant as those in the chute the mirrors augmented from eye level to the base of the skylight's frame, with equal reason that visitors standing in this improbable patio appeared bodiless, their heads floating in endles self-replication between the sides of an optical abyss. Simultaneously expos and enclos faced with and however abstracted from the city, the gallery, and uniform your own likeness, your material part became the focal point--not an externalized image further a habitable experience, a palpable mien in a world where forest steel, concrete, and glass present the appearanceed to be dissolving. It was a giddy and exhilarating feeling.

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