Thinking inside the box

An experiment is in the works under the chilly, blue-white glare of fluorescent lights in an abandoned OfficeMax, one of several deserted storefronts in the Brighton Mills Shopping Plaza.

Men and women in white lab coats greet visitors. They issue latex gloves, a surgical mask, a hospital ID bracelet, and a hairnet. They invite you to place your hands, palms down, on the ‘‘Moral Purifier,’’ a white box that lights up, beeps, and emits a tone when it assesses that you’ve been adequately purified.

Welcome to ‘‘Pure,’’ part social laboratory, part art exhibit, part defiant thumbing of the nose at conventions many hold sacred — in art galleries, in hospitals and labs, and even in big box stores. It’s a sprawling, ambitious, chaotically mounted installation featuring the work of 73 artists, including a roster of medical doctors, mechanical engineers, academics, and wet-behind-the-ears art students.

‘‘Pure’’ is the brainchild of artist and curator Lisa Lunskaya Gordon. The traditional white box of a gallery, she argues, is a ‘‘sterile environment, like a hospital or a clean room. Trying to prevent contagion.’’

Yet art itself, she says, is infectious.

‘‘The artist creates something. That is a pure moment. Then it’s released into the world,’’ Gordon says. ‘‘It takes on new lives that the artist can’t control. Art becomes viral. It develops as contagion.’’

‘‘Pure’’ explores the taboos of art and science; it also plumbs and stretches metaphors about purity and contagion. Spirituality, ideology, food, and hygiene come into play.

The OfficeMax is an anti-gallery. It’s a white box, all right, but the lighting is atrocious, the space — at 20,000 square feet — cavernous. Also, Gordon has chosen to mount no work on the walls. It’s a daring gambit: Many art pieces hang from the ceiling, squat on the floor, or lie flat on tables. Some cluster near the center of the space. The exhibition is intended to function as an installation piece; one work of art infects another. Several sound pieces may create a cacophony.

It’s an audacious idea. It could fly, or fall flat on its face. Gordon is to be applauded for attempting it.

‘‘You have to be a special kind of person to motivate artists to do this show,’’ says sculptor Gina Kamentsky.

‘‘We all wrestle with an ingrown aesthetic of ‘everything needs to breathe,’’’ says Gordon, standing amid the oddly assembled works, not all of which have breathing room.

The artists aren’t complaining. ‘‘I’m thrilled to be a part of this,’’ says video artist Bebe Beard. ‘‘The idea of 73 artists in one place is amazing and calling into question the context in which art seems to happen or science: [That is,] our Western approach to the white box. It’s great.’’

The purified viewer is invited to explore, discover, and diagnose the elements that add up to ‘‘Pure.’’ You may be invited on a guided tour of the ceiling, for which you’ll don a mirror beneath your nose. The ceiling sports a network of white pipes and tubular fluorescent bulbs.

‘‘We all have ways of filtering experience,’’ Gordon says. ‘‘We want to make sure to show that the art is interconnected with the infrastructure, with this horrible lighting.’’

Jerry Russo’s spare photos of bare-naked art galleries hang in plastic sleeves from the ceiling; you can hold them in your hands. L. Corey Hanley, a pathologist, has contributed beautiful quotations from slides of tissue samples, showing not tissue but the extraneous bubbles and cracks that appear in the slides’ binding medium. A chocolate donut appears to undergo mitosis, morphing into two pastries in a series of photos by Kevin Van Aelst. Ven Voisey’s simple, comic, and mechanical ‘‘Voice Paper’’ features a rotating belt — such as the kind used at dry cleaners — to which he’s attached several sheets of typing paper, each methodically being slapped by a piece of plastic.

Gordon and her crew decided that ‘‘Pure’’ needed a pure palette, so the show is mostly black, white, and metallic. Color does leak in here and there. Warm reds and purples fill the inside of the tented ‘‘Womb Room,’’ by Anna Phylaxis, a retreat from the glare, buzz, and rattle of much of the rest of ‘‘Pure.’’ It’s warm and red inside, and you can loll on pillows strewn over the floor. The sound of a heartbeat thrums through the space.

‘‘The paradox,’’ says Gordon, ‘‘is that the contagion — color — is the safest place you can be.’’

It may also be a paradox to feel safe in an abandoned store in a suffering strip mall. Gordon got permission to use it from its owner, Harvard University.

Kamentsky finds the venue inspiring: ‘‘As cities become unlivable for artists because they’re too expensive, we’ll all be moving out to the shopping malls,’’ she says. ‘‘There’s bright lighting and loading docks.’’

At the very least, it’s an unexpected and intriguing place to exhibit art. In a gallery, Gordon says, art ‘‘looks beautiful. But that’s not how art lives. How artificial and how frustrating!’’

Can art live in a big box store? Gordon’s betting on it.