Where imagination takes wing

Work gives form to flight patterns

Just looking in the window of the Boston Sculptors Gallery, I sensed there was something fantastical going on inside. Pale laths of pine swoop through the air, acrobatically caroming from floor to ceiling and across the spacious front gallery.

The installation, Laura Baring-Gould's "In Translation," flies in the face of what we think of as sculpture - a sturdy object planted on the floor. "In Translation" has that, too, but it comprises two radically different bodies of work. The second is a collection of bronze pieces Baring-Gould cast while living and studying in Thailand on a Fulbright grant last year.

The two elements make a yin and a yang. The pine trajectories, loosely modeled on the paths of bees in flight (Baring-Gould was a beekeeper), feel transient, unpredictable, like drawings in the air. The sculptures, which portray Thai children's hats, animal forms, seedpods, and shriveled pears, among other things, read like talismans. The bronze adds metaphorical gravity to these everyday items, stopping them in time, bidding us to contemplate some deeper meaning. Bronze is forever. Pine lath - let alone the flights of bees - is not.

Almost inevitably, the pine part of the installation is more enchanting than the bronze one. Baring-Gould's great talent has always been transforming a space into an artwork quietly potent with spiritual implication. This one delightedly dances around the viewer, catching us up in a magic that defies the solid architecture of the space.

Laura Evans's installation in the rear gallery makes a delicious counterpoint to Baring-Gould's. Evans, too, makes work that's more about drawing than sculpture. If Baring-Gould's pine piece transforms the gallery, Evans's seems to grow organically from the building itself.

Using mundane materials such as cardboard tubes, plaster wrap, newsprint, and dental floss, she has made several endearingly ugly works that pop out of walls and kink and crawl across the floor, echoing the ducts, sockets, and wires of the building's innards.

Two pieces in concert, listed on the title sheet as "At This Juncture/Looping Back" fill the center of the gallery. The joints and sprawls of the cardboard tubes, sometimes covered in tape and plaster, feel like a building toy such as Tubers and Zots, with different components to refashion any way you like. It's gritty art; if a building could dream, it might dream this installation. At the same time, it's ephemeral, as much sketch as sculpture, ready to be redrawn, reused, and recycled.

In recent years, Wendy Richmond has been traveling a lot. She lives in San Diego, and her parents live here. She often found herself waiting in airports. She took to using her cellphone to record others waiting and loitering. She has assembled those short videos of private moments in public spaces into small video works, now up at Carroll and Sons.

Each piece, no longer than a minute and a half, features multiple images, sometimes assembled together in a grid, around a particular site, such as the airport, a lobby, a subway, or a museum. Given the thumbnail size of cellphone video, these require intimate viewing. Richmond pulls you in with her sophisticated sense of architectural and urban patterns, which serve as a stage for people quietly absorbed in their own thoughts (or cellphone conversations).

These works are surprisingly rich; it's easy to dismiss cellphone video as throwaway, but Richmond makes art of it, art that's visually compelling and strangely filled with pathos.

Photographers Amanda Means and John Coplans became friends more than 20 years ago, but they've never shown together before. Coplans, a generation older than Means, died in 2003. Their work at Howard Yezerski Gallery looks exquisite and shares a fascination with a monumental look at small, ordinary things - a vision that pushes toward abstraction.

Coplans was best known for photographing his aging body up close in black and white; here we have his hands, fingers interlocking. "Interlocking Fingers, No. 17" shows fingers nesting within cupped palms, like baby birds. The tips are plump, the fingernails trimmed to the quick but thick and lined, and the insides of the fingers also deeply lined. All the textures of skin, hair, and nail fascinate on this scale.

Yezerski has paired them with Means's black-and-white water-glass series; it turns out the glasses belonged to Coplans; they had a home in his hands. She photographed them up close with a large format camera, so every chip and scratch stands out, like the scratches on an old film, or the odd folds in Coplans's fingers.

"Water Glass 8" is an essay in tones and textures, light and shadow. Bubbles change from white orbs to black as the backdrop shifts from dark wall to pale table. The narrow focus on the face of the glass causes the sides to blur slightly. A shadow puddles in the glass's base, but light collects on the water's surface. It becomes something other than a glass of water, something larger and more meaningful, a vessel of light.