And like curators and critics, viewers will naturally pick favorites. Among this year's crop of 10 artists, mine are Milan Klic and Nadya Volicer. Klic's bamboo and thread fairy-tale vehicles are on wheels that can never move because they're sagging or tilted. The effect is wistful. They're nonsense machines in the tradition of Rube Goldberg. Set against white walls, they look like drawings in space, ghosts of vehicles.
If the DeCordova gave out a Most Popular Award, Volicer would probably get it for turning a bland corridor into a giant wave of wood. Volicer salvaged thousands of fragments of lumber in a dizzying number of colors and shapes. On the floor of the wave, they're pieced together like a jigsaw puzzle, relatively flat, so you can walk on them. The wall becomes more three-dimensional as it ascends to the right, eventually forming a jagged canopy overhead, the pieces barely clinging to one another before the wall crashes in a sweeping leftward plunge that threatens to swallow you. Volicer has stunningly transformed the hallway, in the process inadvertently creating what is surely the greatest-ever entrance to a museum cafe.
In shows that start with a theme defined by curators who then try to find art to fit it, the results can be contrived. Here the curators present each artist's work independently -- and ironically, that leaves the viewer freer to discover serendipitous connections.
Volicer and Mark Wethli, for example, both make huge, site-specific pieces that transform two of the museum's major spaces. Klic and Sally Moore concoct fragile fantasies: about vehicles, in his case; architecture, in hers. Jean Blackburn, too, starts with the mundane -- household furnishings -- and reinterprets it in unsettling ways. Laurie Sloan and Nao Tomii create wiggly biomorphic forms. Lalla A. Essaydi, Barbara Takenaga, and Michael Lewy make art that is obsessive in one way or another.
Wethli's mural ''Elevator" serves as the show's introduction: A 41-foot vertical painted on the wall facing the museum's dramatic staircase, it boasts big, buoyant circles in happy hues that look as if they'd just been blown from a child's bubble pipe.
