by Cate McQuaid

Space seems simple, doesn't it? Even elemental. Solid ground beneath your feet, solid walls to touch--what you see is what you get. Installation artist Beth Galston's show "Structure /NonStructure," a sculptural environment taking over the lower half of the LeSaffre Wilstein Gallery, manages to explode many essential assumptions we have about our environment.

The first shock is the darkness. LeSaffre Wilstein's lower gallery has been sealed from light, like a photographer's darkroom. After your first step, you sense something in front of you. In fact, all over the room, Galston has suspended wire screens from different heights, strips and squares and rectangles of mesh hanging at odd angles, creating boundaries and blockades. Galston has reshaped the space, and she has created a treacherous pea-soup fog rife with unexpected road blocks and sudden turns.

As it turns out, dim incandescent lights hang from the ceiling. As your eyes adjust, so does your perception of the environment. Seeing it, however, doesn't make it more familiar, and this is the delight of participatory installation art: the work confronts not only our senses, but our self-knowledge. Standing in the midst of a strange environment that plays tricks on the eyes we trust so much, we have no choice but to respond.

Galston's work is overwhelming, threatening, and quite wonderful in its ability to break apart the old, encrusted understanding we have of self-in-space...