Playing with perceptions of space

Erwin Redl's installation ''Fade'' fills the walls of the Huret and Spector Gallery at Emerson College with light from red diodes.

Being inside Erwin Redl's "Fade: A Light Installation" at Emerson College is like being sealed within a virtual world. The pinpoints of red lights floating over the walls in the darkness suggest that they're not walls at all, just veils of light.

Redl, best known for draping the Whitney Museum in red and blue lights for the 2002 Whitney Biennial, works with tiny light-emitting diodes mounted in a grid to play with viewers' perceptions of space and architecture.

The artist was tapped for this show by Joseph Ketner, who this fall returned to Boston to take the newly endowed chair as Henry and Lois Foster professor of art at Emerson College. Ketner was lately chief curator at the Milwaukee Art Museum and before that director of the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis. He'll be curating shows, such as this one, at the college's Huret and Spector Gallery. With this exhibit, the little known space takes on an artist of international caliber.

The installation is simple - a grid of red lights on most of the two-story gallery's walls. The effectiveness of Redl's work depends largely on the space in which he installs it. Here, the wall along the stairway leading from one floor to the next makes for a cascade of light. Follow it from the entrance down the stairs, and you're surrounded by a warm glow on all four walls, which rises and fades in intensity in a slow wave around the room.

The result? A contemplative environment with a technological edge. A geek's chapel. Light seems to displace form, invoking spaciousness the way the night sky does, except here you're enveloped in stars, rather than under a dome of them. If "enclosed spaciousness" sounds like an oxymoron, all the better; it mimics, in a way, individual consciousness, as if each of us is sheathed in our own porous (or solid) walls, washed with light and shadow.

'Animal' magnetism
Barbara O'Brien, director of the Trustman Gallery at Simmons College and a longtime bright curatorial light on the Boston area arts scene, is moving to Denver at the end of the semester. O'Brien will be joining her husband, Bo Smith, formerly director of the Museum of Fine Arts' film program, who last month took a post as head of the Denver Film Society.

O'Brien has excelled at nurturing younger curators, as she does with "The Human Animal Project," an exhibit put together by Paul Roux, a South African artist who last year completed studies at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts. "The Human Animal Project" is ambitious, exploring where people are in their evolution and what they are doing to themselves and the planet. The tone of the show is distinctly fresh: Roux chooses not to scold us, but to help us be accountable. Call it post-ironic art. It's sweet with humility, apology, and self-understanding.

Highlights include Hiroko Kikuchi's "Bee-vah: Front Views," about the cruelty of children and the importance of appearance, based on memories she has of being taunted as a child for her buckteeth. She pairs tiny prints of teeth with quotes from thinkers and rock stars: "Too many of today's children have straight teeth and crooked morals." The small scale draws you in, which is also the case in Amy Wilson's "Fair Trade," an artist's book in which Wilson draws herself in a light hand, as an accessible fairy-tale protagonist, mulling over questions of greed and weather.

Jason Lazarus's color photograph "To Abdul Abdi. . ." pays tribute to a Somalian merchant who combats the pain of living in a war torn city by making T-shirts that celebrate its beauty. British artist Araminta De Clermont has photographed South African tattooed gangsters, a nationwide network called the Number Gangs. Her portraits here startle; the men, covered with tattoos and ravaged by life, gaze confrontationally at the camera, but with sadness and vulnerability in their eyes.

Branching out
Catherine Kernan, like most printmakers, is a process-oriented artist. Her woodcut monoprints at Soprafina Gallery sport layers upon layers of printmaking. She carves branch and brier imagery onto large wood panels, passes them through the press several times, and adds her own flourishes with ink. She then applies a waxy coating that gives each print a soft luster.

Kernan's sense of color and layering is astute in several pieces and missteps in one or two. "Brio I" features tangles of branches adorned with berries. Her backing is yellow, and the crisscross of branches is dark, except on the surface, where it's a shimmer of ghostly white-blue, a combination that pops. She orchestrates the three-panel "The Tide Within #2" in pale layers, light-on-light, in a way that makes the earthy branches ethereal. Less effective are the two-panel "Mediation" pieces, in which the top layer masks much of what goes on beneath.