Controlled chaos

LINCOLN --This year's DeCordova Annual Exhibition spews information. It's elegant, lyrical, and even thoughtful spewing, but spewing nonetheless. Many of the dozen artists tapped for the yearly roundup of regional talent confront the tidal wave of information that sweeps over us every day.

Do they make sense of it? Not really. Who can? But they dive in, parse it, become vehicles for it, and make immersive, up-to-the-minute, and thought-provoking art in the process.

Organized by a team of curators headed by Rachel Rosenfield Lafo and Nick Capasso, the 2006 Annual steams along on bundles of yammering, cogitating energy. It makes for a swaggering show with a lot to say, even if it could use a few more moments of contemplative respite.

Jon Sarkin's room sits at the center of the exhibit. He tacks drawings from floor to ceiling, he stacks notebooks on a table, he scatters sketches over the floor. The installation amplifies the restless, fulminating aesthetic found in each Sarkin piece: gruff, cartoonish, Philip Guston-like figures surrounded by lists of artists and commentary such as ''For Dis I Went Ta College?" The installation maps Sarkin's own rambling mind, which comes off as curmudgeonly, bemused, and sly.

In ''Slices of Life," Jen Simms affixes the detritus of her life as an artist and mother to the wall, using more than 50,000 straight pins. Seedpods, bits of plastic, moss, and more fill three giant circles, each ringed with glittering mica. The pins cast bristling shadows. The minute details add up to a fantastical, shimmering whole, as if the chaos of her life does, in the big picture, make beautiful sense.

Evelyn Rydz photographs things that catch her eye in the urban environment. Then she photocopies, draws over, and collages that data until it takes form in muscular, heaving drawings that morph critters with architecture, garbage with technology. The drawings play over scrolls that belly out from a partition and drape over its upper edge, like drops dribbling from a cauldron filled with the artist's roiling imagination.

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See a photo gallery at www.boston.com/ae/theater_arts.

Likewise, Naoe Suzuki borrows from many sources to create unnerving drawings that twist science, neuroses, and fashion into sweet but nightmarish scenarios. Babies swaddled and hooked to tubes stand at the center of each piece. In ''Phyto-nondactylo tendrilopathy" (the titles play on scientific jargon and tease hypochondriacs with potential new diseases), an infant, twined with cords, sprouts from a bud; the cords plug in at the baby's hip and sprout from his back.

Matthew Swarts cadges diagrammatical patterns he finds on the Internet to lay over his own photographs. They fall like technological lace over vaguely suggestive images -- a hand, a nude. Seeing life through a screen is familiar to those who sit in front of a computer much of the day. Here, the delicate scrims both inform and obscure; as veils do, they heighten the sense of mystery about what lies beneath.

Christopher Gray's clever ''This Yellow Object" video uses theatrical improvisation to incisively spoof the often ridiculously ponderous work of interpreting art. The artist circles a yellow sculpture earnestly spouting whatever associations come to mind, such as ''King Midas turned to gold for touching himself."

Like Gray's piece, ''Confined Reflections" won't shut up. Gretchen Skogerson and Garth Zeglin's installation is the least realized work in the show. The mirrored domes typically used to hide surveillance cameras here mask speakers. Walk past, and a dome starts chatting you up: ''Have you ever fallen out of love? I wish I could tell you how much it hurts." Though the device of a whispering mirror is enticing, the monologues echo those of the worst kind of egocentric seatmates on a trans-Atlantic flight.

Here's a twist: Alexander Ross makes abstract photorealist paintings. He builds molds out of plasticine, photographs them, then makes paintings from the photos. They are deliriously up-close views of oozing, cratered green expanses, organic and topographic, weirdly seductive yet repellent.

Ross's work is focused. So is Frank Poor's rich examination of memory using architectural structures and typography from old signage. ''Cherokee," a house with two chimneys, is mounted with its base to the wall, so we confront it, alarmingly, on its side. Large fragments of letters are blocked onto the roof, illegible but suggesting some ungraspable meaning.

The 2006 Annual does have moments of soothing repose. Anna Hepler's fascination with dispersing spheres -- a fireworks display, or a dandelion gone to seed -- led her to make contemplative and lovely works. ''Homage to Ucello" features constellations drawn in dots and tendrils on layers of Plexiglas, three-dimensional and impossibly fragile.

Joe Johnson prowls over city rooftops at night like a cat burglar, photographing the urban landscape at perilous angles with available light. Often, that light is vividly theatrical, as in the stunning ''Flower Pot on Roof." The flowerpot squats in a low, dark corner; the night's dark shadows frame a precipitous drop down glowing, white-washed brick walls.

Hepler, Johnson, and Gregory Miguel Gomez pare information down into lean visual poetry. Gomez's 32-foot-tall bronze sculpture ''Bad Equilibrium" depicts a narrow U-shaped tube. It looks as if a liquid has been poured into the tube, and the liquid rises higher on the right than on the left. The top of the U is higher on the left than on the right. ''Bad Equilibrium" conveys something slippery, yet it's done with such simple eloquence, you could sit for a long time, just looking at it.