The colossal, and not quite earthly, ‘Metaphysical Maze’ winds through science and faith toward the unknown

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The massive exhibition by artist Laurent Grasso at MASS MoCA’s Building 5 is spooky and thrilling, and gives a feeling of boarding a spacecraft to the great beyond.

NORTH ADAMS — There’s a strong whiff of the cosmic to “Metaphysical Maze,” Laurent Grasso’s sprawling new exhibition just opened in MASS MoCA’s football field-sized Building 5. Strains of sparse, minimal music filter through the shadowy space. Strange, luminous textured panels appear on the wall at distant intervals, like fragments of some faraway lunar surface excavated whole and returned to earth for study.

If, in fact, “Metaphysical Maze” is even of this earth at all. Otherworldly films unspool such things as ashen craters alive with the slow typhoon of an energy storm, or a slim black slab hovering over a verdant river and valley, casting sharp shadow below in three bungalow-sized, X-shaped structures that line up along the length of the space. Cryptic objects — a huge copper spiral, a shimmering black cluster of cubes, several stoney facsimile (one assumes) meteorites — occupy walls and floors in the various right-angled spaces the structures create.

Or maybe that’s just me. I mean that as high compliment. The power of “Metaphysical Maze” — and it has plenty — is in its intentionally hard read, and the open space for interpreration it offers. Some might see it as esoteric (which it is), but better terms, I think, might be evocative, generative, fertile. Its confusions are seductive, atmospheric, enveloping, and frequently gorgeous. It presents a world to explore, where you cut your own path. There is no beginning, middle or end; there just is, to make of what you will.

But: It’s not just me, raised on various generations of foundational sci-fi — Star Trek, Star Wars, Asimov, Bradbury though I was. Grasso has long explored the gap between scientific fact and theory; his work roots in the factually sound, then reaches deep into the distantly possible.

Anyway. This has always been rich terrain to mine. Science fiction, in the words of the great author Ray Bradbury, “balances you on a cliff, while fantasy shoves you off.” That tenuous perch on the edge of reality…

Opening of the article, excerpted from The Boston Globe. To read the rest, open the article on the publisher's site.