by Christine Temin

"In summer, art goes outside like people do, and so some of the most intriguing exhibitions around now are sculpture shows out-of-doors.....

There's a solo show by artist Beth Galston, the result of her work as a fellow at Radcliffe College's Bunting Institute. Galston is known for her installations that use fabric scrims to sculpt space. Her "Translucent Garden" is an extension of that work: a series of architecturally inspired shapes made of thin sheets of perforated aluminum that let the light through. The works are placed in a civilized urban oasis: the grounds of the Bunting Insitute.

You might walk right past Galston's sculpture if you weren't tuned into it. The cylinder on a pole stuck into the ground--the first piece you encounter if you arrive through the parking lot--could almost be a trash receptacle or even a new-fangled form of phone booth or mailbox. It has an official character.

These are not attention-grabbing works. But they're very good ones. Most of them are situated on an oval of grass in the center of the Bunting buildings. Those buildings, converted 19th-century houses, are architectural translations of Victorian rectitude. A couple of them have mansard roofs with scalloped slates, while the others are plainer farmhouse types. They're painted pale rose, peach, buttercup and warm beige. The effect is one of traditional feminity--not at all the image of the Bunting, which describes itself as the "largest and oldest multidisciplinary center of advanced studies for women in the country."

Although I'd been to the Bunting several times, I'd never thought about these buildings as anything but attractive and useful: It took Galston's installation to make me really look at them. It was a pleasant task, sitting on a teak bench among the orderly plantings of rhododendrons, holly, potentilla, and day lilies, all parked in pine bark. This is a very managed, controlled, ladylike environment. Some of Galston's works comment on that ambience. The doll-size houses that repeat in miniature the sweet pastel colors and the gabled, mansard or just plain peaked roof lines of the real houses, also seem to be making fun or them. Some of the pieces contradict the sense of control and order, especially those works where tall grass has been allowed to grow through the holes in the metal. It's ironic that the man-made high-tech material is nurturing wildness, literally protecting it from being mowed down.

A pair of serpentine paths, each maybe eight-feet long, lie on top of the grass. A sign says you can walk on them, but they seem better to look at: You'd only be able to take a half dozen steps, anyway. The wiggled lines of the paths have an obvious feminine reference, as do their diminutive scale.

The largest pieces suggest walls, doors and platforms, and they both shape space and, because of their ethereal translucence, evade it. Down a path, away from the other pieces, is one that looks like a treehouse. You can stand up inside it, and your view of the rest of the world is automatically softened and filtered.

A work that subtly implies danger and adventure is one that extends straight out from a little slope; it reminds me of those houses that cling to the sides of canyons in Los Angeles, until a mudslide sweeps them off. This sculpture, too, is being conquered by nature, in the form of overgrown grass poking up through the holes.

Galston's "Translucent Garden" is on view at the Bunting Institute, 34 Concord Ave., Cambridge, through Aug. 31."