The Formal Absences of Precious Things Installation by Tannaz Farsi.

The only sound is a low hum, coming from air pumps hidden in the ceiling. It's semi-dark as if evening is falling, and continuing to fall, caught in a loop of transition. At the far end of the gallery along the back wall, a four-part projection offers a lateral stripe of views. Gradually darkening over a 20-minute period, these show roofs and adjacent dwellings, a patch of sky fretted with bare tree branches, and a close-up of a couple of round streetlights that resemble flying saucers. These videos were shot from Iranian-American artist Tannaz Farsi's windows at home in Eugene, Oregon.

Eight double-mattress-size semi-opaque vinyl bags are scattered through the gallery. Air hoses running up and under the acoustic tiles overhead are draped loosely in clusters, like lianas in a minimalist rain forest. A constant stream of air keeps the bags as plump as pythons. One bag just opposite the gallery entrance leans upright against the wall, its lower half illuminated from behind by a fluorescent lamp along the baseboard. It shimmers with a lunar glow. Several others are propped up here and there, and the rest are scattered around the floor. It's like a slumber party in an alien laboratory.

Farsi titles the show the formal absences of precious things, a line from cyberpunk author William Gibson's novel All Tomorrow's Parties. That book is about the merging of history with the mutability of cyberspace, and the line itself is an incidental reference to empty pedestals in a jewelry-store window. Farsi's bags are similarly emblems of an emptiness which, Farsi says, she finds between "the act of looking and the notion of finding meaning in the look."

Farsi's concern, posed by contemporary feminist theory especially in the writings of French psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva, has to do with the idea of scopophilia (literally "love of looking') and the way identity is bent under the force of "the gaze." Between the moment of visual or sensual connection and the naming of an object, there is a gap in which the thing or person or place and one's own sense of self are in flux, as if perception were a sort of traveling and recognition a return. Such is the hidden source of anxiety in this otherworldly chamber - the possibility of the loss of home's essential contours.

That may be, but at first glance the smoothly burgeoning vinyl forms have an undeniable formal appeal and presence, riding on such usually calming tropes as twilight, pregnancy and the steadiness of low-level noise. They're also reminiscent of abstract expressionist Mark Rothko's glowing rectangular patches, which seem to hover between anxiety and serenity. Rothko's friend and analyst Albert Grokoest called those "Mark's tombstones," and here also these similar shapes seem to calmly memorialize and contain the absence of something very precious, perhaps the energies of emotional connection, as they disappear at the far edge of depression or at that event horizon we call death.

Like many current sculptural/installation artists, Farsi's work is site-specific, adjusting its dimensions and even complexity to the limits of a particular gallery. Originally Farsi intended to fill the room with many more bags, covering the floor and generating a sense of empty crowding, as if the sky, visible through Farsi's projected windows, were being pumped in and packaged for use with a different identity. From a formal point of view, the artist is filling space with space, interrupted by a skin of plastic and differentiated by variations in air pressure. Farsi simplifies the complicated interstices of molecular containment so that we see what we ultimately, physically, is nothingness stacked against emptiness, strapped to a vacuum. The sky is an idea, a point of view from the surface of the earth, a memory or a hope more than a physical entity. But the same can be said of anything. Among the operations Farsi performs here is a separation of what the linguist Ferdinand de Saussure called a "sign" into its constituent parts. Saussure wrote that in language there are no positive terms, but only differences. At the formal absences of precious things we are shown a type of object sitting at the border of meaning; these bags, singly or en masse, have neither name nor function, operating as terms in a mysterious system that is at once evocative of things as wildly differing as circulation and pillows, moons, oxygen tents and pumpkin patches - while being none of these things, nor anything else definite.

Such thoughts hang like a low-lying mist in the dark, faintly humming room. Aside from the bags and lights and tubes, the only other object here is a white semi-transparent table. Its surface is completely covered with a grid-like pattern of small nodules hooked up to air hoses. Placed on top of this "control panel," as Farsi designates it, are two arm and hand coverings, a little like those used to handle radioactive materials in a laboratory setting. This is the only indication of human or humanoid presence in the exhibit. Farsi intends to emphasize the psychological isolation of the situation she depicts and its precariousness. Is there, or was there once, a person who operated this emptying machine, or are such indications also merely an absence? Like British artist Damien Hirst's too-famous diamond-encrusted skull, Farsi's installation suggests that all precious things, all the names we treasure, decorate an eternity we cannot understand or, perhaps, endure.

Tannaz Farsi: the formal absences of precious things

Through April 26

The Sculpture Center

1834 E. 123rd St.

sculpturecenter.org