Art outside the frame: Two new installations push boundaries

Installation art — the creation of an entire art environment that pushes beyond the borders of a painting or sculpture — hit it big in the 1980s and has been a powerful option for artists ever since. Two current exhibitions are brilliant examples of how installation art can create very different kinds of experiences for viewers.

While Mandy Greer's installations at the Bellevue Arts Museum are sensual and fanciful, laden with sumptuous decoration, color, texture and mythology, the installation by Carolyn Healy and John Phillips at Suyama Space is coolly geometric and cerebral, using a minimum of visual adornment.

Seattle-based artist Greer makes costumes, sculptures and installation works using beading, crocheting, sewing and other time-consuming methods that have been traditionally associated with women. In addition to displaying examples of her sculptures and costumes from the past decade, Greer's exhibition at Bellevue Arts Museum features "Dare alla Luce," her biggest and most elaborate installation to date.

Walking into the large gallery space is like entering a swampy, primordial world; Greer's signature strands of crocheted and beaded fabric loop down from the high ceiling, like moss-covered chandeliers. Beyond this pleasantly murky green space, you're greeted with stark contrasts between white and black, light and dark, sky and sea. Starlike forms, glistening with silver and white beads, dangle from the ceiling, while a jet-black pelican presides over the space. Spilling from the pelican's mouth are streams of white fabric, beads, shells and jewels, as if the bird is regurgitating life-giving beauty and light.

Greer, whose work often touches on themes of motherhood and creation, has titled this installation "Dare alla Luce," meaning "to give to the light," an Italian expression for giving birth. Drawing on the myth of the origin of the Milky Way, Greer creates a mystical world of darkness and light, sea and sky, filled with objects that are rather mind-boggling in their detail. Get up close and notice how the moon, Greer's large spherical sculpture, is covered with swirling patterns of beads, buttons and shells, all of which are hand-sewn onto the form, with silver, white or gray thread. Greer's acts of creation — her labor-intensive, feminine and craft-oriented processes — are embedded in the installation.

While Greer completely transforms the BAM galleries, creating fantastic new worlds, Healy and Phillips, Philadelphia-based collaborative artists, use the gallery at Suyama Space much differently. Ropes, rods and wires hang at varying heights from the ceiling or from each other; pulleys, weights and other objects dangle from the zigzagging network. The installation seems, at first, to minimally inhabit the space, creating a self-contained, ambiguous system.

But the crisscrossing lines and the simple, industrial shapes of the carefully chosen objects keep you looking up, down and around the space. Eventually, the gallery itself — a former garage with old wooden floors and new, shiny, silver air ducts — seems to become a part of Healy and Phillips' installation, rather than the other way around.

As you become increasingly aware of your surroundings, you might begin to wonder about the light and sound. What exactly are those faint hums and scratchy noises? What are those gently moving lines and circles projected on the walls? Healy and Phillips use subtle sound and video to heighten the sense of inquiry. The video projections give off a scientific, or even sci-fi, effect, conjuring up associations with Petri dishes, bar graphs and light tunnels. The quiet audio samplings seem to range from the scraping sounds of old tapes to musical hummings that might come from an outer-space movie.

All of these components — the audio and video elements and the system of hooks, pulleys, cables and rods — generate the impression that this work of art is about generation itself, about the human creation of forms and systems. Healy and Phillips, in spare, abstract ways, allude to engineering, architecture, industry and science.

These fields rely on the construction of form and meaning through the study and use of elemental, but ultimately complex, units and processes. Consider the title of the installation, "MetaphorM." This word, fabricated by the artists, asks us to think about the relationship between metaphor and form, while also slipping in the idea of metamorphosis: One thing becomes another as we look and listen.

And here is the point of convergence for Healy and Phillips and Greer, despite their wildly disparate aesthetic approaches: These artists reveal notions of transformation and how we derive meaning from the processes of creation.