By Jeffrey Cyphers Wright

Between oblivion and mortality, there is a void we can imagine through art. This void can be expressed as a dislocation in time or as a pattern in chaos. Such is the arc projected between agitation and repose in the show of the same name curated by Gregory Volk and Sabine Russ at Tanya Bonakdar. Time, unity and dissolution are all brought into play in this expansive group show that brings to bear the anxieties as well as the resolutions of our era.

Beginning with Via Lewandowsky’s clock, whose face spins backwards but whose hands tell the right time, we enter a realm of suspension. Time becomes less fluid and more gelled as we wade through eons of art history and our collective construct of who we are. This piece asks not what time it is, but what time means.

Looking into the gallery Diana Al-Hadid’s celestial pulpit pulls us palpably. “Portal to a Black Hole” oozes with implied infinity. Scorched and charred, it drips and dances as it writhes and rises. Made of plywood, cardboard, plastic and fiberglass, the simplest materials here mimic the finest. Cardboard tubes, notched and painted silver, become pipe organs. Finely filigreed windows are half burned and partly blown out, leaving skeletal remains. Sections of fiberglass have been torched. The fluted columns are cracked and tilting. There is an aura of decaying transformation that recalls Anselm Keifer’s bright bleakness.

The wrenched and damaged dome at the top almost shudders. This is the architecture of both salvation and destruction. It is the bombed out cathedral of Cologne. It is the last building standing in Hiroshima. It is the mosque in Samarra.

Under the dome, inside the sacral space, a spiral staircase winds. On each step a black and white plastic keyboard has been heated to dissolution. Finally, in this congruence where science and faith interface, we imagine the sound a black hole reportedly makes: a B flat 57 octaves below middle C. Utterly transporting.

Creating a wonderfully imposing dialogue with “Portal…”, is Ragna Robertsdottir’s “Lava Landscape.” This 10 by 26 foot installation of black lava chips glued on the white wall is both lavish and austere. Its absence of design is refreshing and leads to unexpected gatherings, surges and configurations, exploring our tendency to find patterns and arrangements.

Exploring our precepts in another way proves to be a risky business as Rainer Ganahl rides a bike against traffic. His 22-minute DVD is a record of his ride from one historic building to another in Bucharest. Always in the frame are the unheld handle bars as Ganahl peddles right down the middle of the wrong side of the boulevard. Hitting on numerous issues, from ecology to economy, the circus meets the savant as the artist dares to challenge our societal and artistic strictures.

Similarly dangerous, Holly Zausner’s DVD “Unseen” features a tiger in a sculpture park juxtaposed with a woman carrying a rubber dummy through Berlin. Courting disaster in a black and white C-print, Zausner captures a store window exploding behind a pedestrian. The drama is restrained while the danger (and excitement) remains. Is this is how we balance our progress in a perilous era?

Another balancing act can be seen in Jon McCafferty’s abstract paintings of mountains. Beginning with the terraces of topographical models, the stacked and interlocking shapes suggest both logic and chaos.

In a serene kinetic wall sculpture of wires and blinking lights, Claire Watkins mimics the passage of neurons through the brain. An elegant network of cast bronze parts, wires, magnets and tiny lights is spread out over a wall. By also recalling a system of twigs or roots it conflates the organic with the processed, even as it suggests the processes of thought itself.

The curators state that this is “an agitated exhibition for an agitated time in which wavering hopefulness is accompanied by constant, nagging dread.” Questioning our time as well as our passage through it, each of these works stakes out unique territory. Taken together they form a mighty choir of disparate but not desperate voices.