Exploring the mysteries of 'Cosmoses'

The final photograph Neeta Madahar made for her last body of work, "Falling," showed sycamore seeds pinwheeling through the night sky. The perspective -- looking skyward -- was deliciously perplexing. The inky background might have been as deep as the heavens or as flat as blacktop.

"Cosmoses," Madahar's lovely new work at Howard Yezerski Gallery, dances along that same edge. For "Cosmoses," Madahar fashioned scores of origami cosmos flowers, scattered them on photographic paper, and exposed them to light, making photograms. The origami flowers come in several colors and sizes; some are opaque and some translucent. She utilized different types of photographic paper: Some develop positive images, some negative.

Translucent flowers shimmer like vessels of light, sometimes colliding with their shadowy opaque counterparts. The glossy paper adds to the retinal fix; our eyes love shiny, glowing things the way kittens love string. In "Cosmoses Blue VI (Negative)," electric blue and violet flowers pulse against a black ground. "Cosmoses Mixed VI (Positive)" riots with pink, yellow, and orange flowers against a white ground.

"Cosmoses" has much in common with "Falling." Madahar dizzies her viewer with the suggestion of gazing into infinity, but whether the ground is deep space or flat is up for argument. Both efforts also involve mathematical patterns -- in the folding of the origami flowers, in the spiraling descent of the sycamore seeds -- while depicting things that appear disorderly and wild. Both invoke stillness and yet, with their quality of spinning and repetition, suggest a carnival. "Cosmoses" tweaks and expands ideas from "Falling," and the deeper this artist digs, the more mystery she uncovers.

Yezerski has paired Madahar's photos with "Fox," a single sculpture by Rona Pondick. It's a lithe and spooky stainless steel piece depicting a fox whose long neck ends in a man's head resting on the ground. This coupling works better formally than it does thematically. Madahar's images, impossible to pin in space, make for a floaty viewing experience; Pondick's lean and grounded work is a beautiful anchor, even while its mirrored surface disarms our sense of reality. But Pondick's lone nightmarish figure tears at the fabric of Madahar's sweet, lulling dreamscapes. It's like finding a chili pepper in your milkshake.

Bibliophiles will love the enchanting group photo show at Bernard Toale Gallery, "Summer Reading." All the works pay tribute to the book. Some focus on the object itself; others are narrative, meditating on reading's reverie, or on the library as portrait.

Veronica Bailey's ravishing piece belongs to the first category. "Art of the Avant-Garde in Russia, Selections From the George Costakis Collection, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York (1961)" looks at a single, slender volume, standing on edge and barely open. The color print is nearly black and white; creamy pages fan against a black backdrop. The shadowy seam within beckons. Bailey uses form to turn the book into an object of desire.

Abelardo Morell achieves a similar effect with "Three Women by Hopper," a black-and-white image of a book full of plates of Edward Hopper paintings, each with a seductress, barely glimpsed. Desire pops up as well in Toni Pepe's untitled work, in which a woman's bright red lips break into the frame to blow a cloud of dust from an open book titled "Apology."

Cara Barer's intimate images of water-damaged books are alarming and beautiful; "Found Reference" shows a book cracked so wide the spine bows and the pages billow around it like wavy tresses. Gillian Laub tells volumes about her parents with "Mom and Dad's Bookshelf, Chappaqua," in which a book on anorexia sits beside "Born to Shop," and jaunty photographic cut-outs of Mom and Dad in cowboy gear perch on a shelf.

Taking her cue from John Cage and R. Murray Schafer, a Canadian composer who founded the World Soundscape Project in the 1970s to explore how people relate to their aural environments, curator Liz Kelton Sheehan has put together "Soundmarks," a sound art exhibition at Art Interactive.

The show is intriguing but scattershot. Amy Stacey Curtis's pieces feel elementary. "Exchange" asks the viewer to re-record a phrase just listened to on a tape recorder. The concept is like the game of telephone; "piece of" becomes "pizza," and ultimately you have strings of words composed unconsciously by several people. But boy, are they dull to listen to. The art here, as often with Cage, is more in the process than the product.

The team of Zach Poff and N.B. Aldrich offers more technologically sophisticated work. "The Aural Ecosystem" features several tiny speakers on metal stalks; they're supposed to interact the way birds might in an aviary, responding to one another and to their environment. When I was there, only one speaker emitted a soft buzz, and none of the others picked up on it.

Poff and Aldrich present provocative ideas, but in this and another piece, "The Past Is a Ghost," the quiet environment in and around the gallery did not support the art, which required interaction with more than a solo visitor to begin to make sense.

Unnatural: Neeta Madahar and Rona Pondick
At: Howard Yezerski Gallery, 14 Newbury St., through Aug. 18. 617-262-0550, howardyezerskigallery.com

Summer Reading
At: Bernard Toale Gallery, 450 Harrison Ave., through Aug. 18. 617-482-2477, bernardtoalegallery.com

Soundmarks: Amy Stacey Curtis and Zach Poff + N.B. Aldrich
At: Art Interactive, 130 Bishop Allen Drive, Cambridge, through Aug. 18. 617-498-0100, artinteractive.org