Posted on Fri, Jun. 27, 2008

Never mind the moon over Miami.

Mark Handforth's wall-size sun -- its rays crafted from fluorescent light fixtures and arranged like an abanico, a Spanish fan -- that rises or sets according to whether you're entering or leaving, reigns over the Miami Art Museum's Disappearances, Shadows, and Illusions.

Western Sun, shown at the 2004 Whitney Biennial and newly acquired by MAM, opens a show so bright some installations carry warning labels, to which one can add: If you're prone to migraines induced by light, stay away. Really. But if you like art that stretches definitions and challenges point of view, this is a must-see exhibit.

The artists use lighting effects, tricks of perception and reflection, movement and audio to alter, and sometimes enhance, the viewing experience. These are works that, as curator Peter Boswell puts it, ``purposely court impermanence and create uncertainty in the mind of the viewer.''

''Death, it's closer than you think,'' reads a purple neon sign by Miami's Bert Rodríguez. The word ''death'' blinks on and off, and given the title of the work (A Friendly Reminder), Rodríguez is cautioning us about the fragility and fleeting nature of our days.

Assembled in such a way that they play off each other, the show's 55 works are composed of special installations by conceptual Miami artists, including commissioned works by Leyden Rodríguez-Casanova, Kerry Phillips, Matt Schreiber and Tom Scicluna and some loans from local collectors.

Rodríguez-Casanova's piece, A Seemingly Open Door, simultaneously confuses and delights.

It's an ordinary, paneled white door, and it's ajar. Or so you think by the light streaming from the other side.

You walk over to it and pull on the knob to see where the door leads. But it doesn't open. It feels jammed, so you push.

''No, no, no!!!'' a guard screams.

``Didn't you read the label?''

And so you discover that it is what the label says it is: A seemingly open door. Very Zen.

''It's a frozen moment, and it doesn't give you an explanation or a story to go with it,'' Rodríguez-Casanova says. ``It's something very beautiful, and you really want to access it, but there's no way.''

So don't test that door knob or throw a shoulder at it unless you want to turn a shade of red brighter than Handforth's sun.

Another MAM acquisition being shown for the first time is Escada Inexplicável 2 (Inexplicable Staircase 2), a receding white-on-gray staircase by veteran Brazilian artist Regina Silveira that plays with the illusion of volume in a two-dimensional space, perhaps suggesting that truth often depends on point of view.

Likewise, Kerry Phillips' You could always see real far off even when you weren't trying plays with optical illusions. Installed in the middle of a room, the piece consists of two hills made from carpet scraps. They rise from MAM's beige-carpeted floor, and no matter how long you try, you can't discern where the MAM floor ends and Phillips' sculpture begins. The mounds look like something monstrous yet maternal (one is twice as large as the other) is growing from the ground.

''I started working with carpet originally because I hate carpet,'' Phillips says. ``I still have waking nightmares about the carpet I grew up with as a kid, which, for the most part, my parents still have. Some of which is also in the current installation. This project is the result of an ongoing relationship -- one I tried to end almost as soon as it started, but I was faced with the realization that I don't always get to make those decisions. Having all of this material in my studio, I was constantly having to move it out of the way, sort it, re-stack it and move it back. The pieces just naturally started to develop sculpturally. I was also really drawn to how people, and even my dog, interacted with the forms. They were compelled to interact with them physically. . . . I love this aspect of work -- the, I can't help but. . . .''

A poetic installation of mirrors by Venezuelan Magdalena Fernández, 1i004, also plays with your eyes and mind, but nothing quite prepares you for the anxiety caused by the warning on Schreiber's commissioned work Guilloche, The Blind Man, an abstraction of laser lights and steel presented in a room cloaked in solid darkness.

''This installation involves laser beams, which can be hazardous if they are looked at directly,'' a label says. ``Please be careful not to put your eye directly in the path of a beam.''

Dare you even step in there?

Another work that causes a another sort of anxiety is also one of the most moving: Elizabeth Cerejido's intimate installation, Absence Series, in which the former Frost Art Museum curator chronicles her mother's descent into Alzheimer's with 13 color photographs and a video assembled in a small white room.

It is so personal that one feels like an intruder viewing the video Cerejido made with Mark Roven of how her mother, talking to herself, incessantly rocks in one of those chairs sold along Calle Ocho.

Cerejido's work with the subject of loss is heartbreaking as she documents the mundane objects her mother frequently misplaced -- her husband's umbrella, her pillbox, her address book. And she captures with her camera the instructions left for her mother on small notes all over the house, on the air-conditioner unit, on the telephone -- ''No tocar,'' don't touch.

A picture of the quintessential elder-Cuban-exile home emerges: the all-important radio next to the rocking chair; the dietary supplements advertised on Cuban radio on the long list of daily medicines.

''Pagar la cantina,'' reads the to-do list, referring to the home-food services to which early exiles subscribed to cope with the long hours of factory work.

Such diversity of backgrounds, experiences and topics among the Miami artists assembled here adds another layer of interest to the show.

Handforth was born in 1969 in Hong Kong and was educated in Germany and London. Born in Cleveland, Schreiber studied at the Royal College of Art in London and is an M.F.A. graduate of Chicago's Art Institute. Rodríguez-Casanova, born in Havana, came to the United States on the 1980 Mariel boatlift when he was 6 and is a graduate of the New World School of the Arts.

All of their works, Boswell says, invite viewers to ''examine the presumptions we bring with us,'' and encourage people to ``look at the world in a new light.''