Glimmers in the woods

French knew about placing art in situ. He sculpted Abraham Lincoln for the Lincoln Memorial, and his work can be seen all around the Boston area: the angel “Casting Bread Upon the Waters’’ over a fountain in the Public Garden; the “Minute Man’’ statue in Concord; and the bronze lobby doors of the Boston Public Library. After French (1850-1931) bought the former Warner farm here in 1896, he built a sculpture studio and implemented his own landscape design, with formal gardens and woodland paths, where he placed sculptures by his artist friends.

Those artworks are gone, save for traces here and there, but they have made way for an engaging group of sculptures that take terrific advantage of their setting. Many of the pieces in this summer’s exhibition, organized by Denise Markonish, curator at Mass MoCA, would look pallid and unfulfilled in a museum or gallery, but along the sloping lawns, or even better, in the woods beyond French’s home and studio, they are catalyzed by their surroundings.

“Space Is the Place,’’ the title of jazz musician Sun Ra’s 1970s film, is the show’s theme. That sounds vague, but it plants us firmly in these bucolic environs, and invites contemplation of both details and vistas, while also embracing the concept of home.

June Ahrens built a small house out of mirror shards and set it in the forest. The piece, “Our Shrinking World,’’ is almost invisible from a distance, camouflaged by reflection, and even up close it shimmers with leaves. But despite its beauty, its construction speaks of illusion, sharp edges, and danger. Lucy Hodgson’s “Happy Landings!’’ looks broken on the manicured lawn. A winged beast made of house shingles and rusty plumbing pipes, it seems to have taken a nasty spill with the real estate market, whereas “Pyramid,’’ by Ursula Clark, a sheltering stack of hay bales humbly nodding to the monuments of Egypt, seems like a safer bet as a place to stay warm and dry.

I was at first put off by Greg Lock’s “The Pixelated Log,’’ which, at nearly 10 feet high, is covered with colorful resin tiles. Not sure what to make of it, I dialed up the exhibition’s audio guide on my cellphone, and listened to Lock explain his process and intentions. He photographed a log, and then re-created the digital image in real life, right down to the pixels. The sculpture is best experienced from the distance at which the pixels coalesce. As I tromped out into the woods, I turned back: The log appeared pale and mottled, quite natural. The static piece became interactive, in a smart use of the ample space at Chesterwood.

Similarly, Brian Auwarter’s four “Emotional Atmosphere Stations’’ were initially set around the perimeter at Chesterwood, and over time are being moved throughout the estate, ultimately to convene in the center. He made the cubes out of layers of blue hardware screen, each in an accordion fold, with some screens folded vertically and some horizontally. The blue of the cubes is electric, and they’re dizzying to walk past, as they seem to wink and glimmer.

“Sprout,’’ a fabulous and imposing piece by Rick Brown, unfolds from an upright, dead hemlock in a majestic fan of planks, flowing right out of the tree in a brawny, man-made way, a seemingly impossible collaboration between sculptor and nature. Puffy steel clouds on poles suspended at eye level make up Dana Filibert’s “Cloudscape,’’ puckish amid the greenery. Then there’s a piece so organic you might miss it: Kaete Brittin Shaw’s “Aerial Tendrils,’’ delicate, undulating disks of porcelain in earth tones, strung on aircraft cable and wound around the limbs of an apple tree. It could be mistaken for a fungus growing naturally along the branches, but it’s really more like a bracelet.

“Endangered Birds,’’ Pat Brentano Bramnick’s simple, elegant series of avian cutouts in white panels, is installed around an overlook in the woods, with a view of the hills of Stockbridge, Lenox, and Lee. The silhouettes, through which we glimpse leaves and sky, are ghostly. Other works specifically address the idea of space and vista within the realm of landscape art: Gordon Chandler’s “Easel and Bench’’ makes the easel a vast, empty frame through which we glimpse Chesterwood’s manicured lawn and gardens as if the scene were a painting.

Oddly, the ground-level works fall flat. “Excavation,’’ by Linda Cross, a low heap of rubble near an old stone wall, fails to stir the imagination, and while Elizabeth Knowles’s “POD’’ mosaic of white pebbles and brightly patterned paintings visually pops off the ground, it fights its surroundings rather than engage them.

There’s more to see, 20 artists in all. One of the great themes of art history is the divide between nature and culture. “Contemporary Sculpture at Chesterwood 2009’’ illustrates how well they can work together.