Aqueous solutions The water ways of Mags Harries and Lajos Héder; plus Bill Armstrong at Kayafas BY CHRISTOPHER MILLIS
	"Reaching Water": Mags Harries and Lajos Héder At the Cambridge Arts Council Gallery, 344 Broadway in Cambridge, through February 2, and at Walter J. Sullivan Purification Plant, 250 Fresh Pond Parkway in Cambridge, permanent installation. "Photographs by Bill Armstrong" At Gallery Kayafas, 450 Harrison Avenue in the South End, through January 29.

When my son was three, he entered full throttle into his dinosaur and fossil phase, which I’ve since come to regard as a period in cognitive development every bit as critical as the onset of language or morality or a sense of autonomy. I remember one episode distinctly (besides the time he ran up to another toddler at day care and cried, "Let’s play dilophosaurus!") on the "before" side of the holiday season 10 years ago. We were walking through the Copley Square mall when my son, just a couple feet from the floor himself, looked down and stopped dead in his tracks. To his astonishment, and eventually mine, he discovered that the granite floor connecting the shops was "alive" with ossified creatures, a stone seabed of ammonites, bivalves, and brachiopods. The shoppers parted around us like water while we scrutinized the floor we would no longer take for granted.

Of the five times in my adult life I’ve looked down in amazement to discover that what I’d taken for common flooring was actually a slice from a thrilling narrative (the green discs in the marble pavement of the Roman Forum were coins that melted when Rome burned), two are attributable to Mags Harries, the renowned public-installation artist whose mini retrospective at the Cambridge Arts Council Gallery inspired the most recent epiphany. "Reaching Water" is both a site- and non-site-specific installation: she and her husband, Lajos Héder, built one piece for the show, but the rest of the exhibit refers to works outside the gallery with models, videos, artifacts and a Web-cam simulcast. And though it treats the theme of how two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen runs through Harries’s work, the show wants to transport you, as it did me, to the Walter J. Sullivan Purification Plant at 250 Fresh Pond Parkway, which Harries and Héder helped design in 2001.

Even on an overcast winter day, the entrance to the purification plant, with its vaulted ceiling and walls of glass windows overlooking Fresh Pond Reservoir, makes you feel you’re on a ship at sea. And though Harries and Héder can’t take credit for the building design (as they can for the hydropower station in Phoenix, which they had a greater hand in making in 2003), their influence was decidedly expansive. Inside the ballroom-like main hall, before a ceiling-to-floor arched window overlooking the pond, stands a 14-foot-tall clear glass water column. It suggests a transparent Art Deco silo capped by an etched glass weathervane shaped like a cloud. The water column does not merely stand, however. Just beyond it, outdoors along the path that traces the reservoir, a drinking fountain — set into a sculpture that resembles the retreating tail of a very large fish — makes bubbles rise and lights react within the water column whenever somebody outside takes a drink. (Except when it’s been turned off, as it was when I visited.)

A few feet from the bubbler, Harries and Héder have installed a large, circular metal portal onto the fence protecting the reservoir. Although it’s the simplest part of the project, it may be the most ingenious. Unlike the fountain or the water column or the other aspects of their design, you can’t ignore the fence window. If you’re not thirsty, you won’t drink from the fountain; if you don’t look up when you’re drinking, you won’t see the water column respond to your sips. But the fence window is like a giant, make-believe lens. To see it is to have to look through it, and to look through it means seeing Fresh Pond through a round frame, as if each onlooker were holding a magnifying glass up to a pool.

The literature that accompanies the CAC show and is available at the water-treatment plant mentions the floor of the plant as part of the installation, but at first I didn’t even see it. Taken up as I was with the water column and its outdoor counterparts, and almost unable to see past the high glare on the terrazzo floor, I was about to leave the facility when I noticed something round and blue at my feet, a circular pattern in the flooring labeled "Mt. Auburn Cemetery." A regular visitor to Mount Auburn, I knew immediately the body of water it represented. With that, I began studying the floor, angling myself so the light didn’t obscure the inlay, and realized that everything I’d been walking on was a map — not just of the city but of the waterways of Cambridge. What I took for railroad tracks are the pipes that transport water from Fresh Pond to the city. The foot-wide blue snake coursing across the pavement is the Charles River, and the small oases of blue are the pools and bubblers and fountains that dot the municipality. The floor was alive.

The literature for "Reaching Water," particularly an essay by Hafthor Yngvason, director of public art for the Cambridge Arts Council, makes a case for seeing what Harries and Héder do as "water art," as does "Reaching Water" itself. The exhibit alludes to both the Cambridge and the Phoenix water-plant projects, and it includes a ceiling-hung sculpture that involves coursing water. "Reaching Water" also boasts a video about The Bronx River Golden Ball, a public art and community project in which Harries, Héder, and a sporty team of art activists canoe down the Bronx River. From Bronxville in Westchester south to the Bronx, the group guide a giant, floating, gold-plated fiberglass ball at the end of tremendous fishing net. (For the sake of enjoying the video, try not to pay attention to either Governor Pataki or the dance troupe that trailed the water travelers.)

Water, however, is a subset of these artists’ greater concern, which is the earth itself. The one piece they made for "Reaching Water" has as its centerpiece not the continuous flow of water across glass shelves overhead but the reflection of that fabricated stream on the floor where we’re invited to walk. Another of their installations, from the 1997 and 1998 Cambridge River Festival, used spooled threads to represent the length of the Charles. One of Harries’s most famous public sculptures, Asarotum, is an amalgam of bronze debris — vegetable scraps, milk cartons, newspapers — that she embedded into the sidewalks of the pre–Big Dig Haymarket. (You’ll also know her work by all those "lost" bronzed gloves dotting the Davis Square T-stop escalators.) When I stumbled upon the Haymarket installation a quarter-century ago, it took my breath away.

IF YOU’RE INTERESTED in the antithesis of Harries and Héder — someone whose work is motionless, colorful, premeditated, seemingly out of focus, and decidedly not of the earth — then the pleasures of Bill Armstrong’s voluptuous and provocative photographs await you at Gallery Kayafas. Armstrong belongs to that rarest of photography’s practitioners — he takes pictures of what nobody has ever seen, what doesn’t exist. By arranging pieces of color-drenched paper into shapes resembling masks or figures or nebulae and then setting the camera, in the words of gallery director Arlette Kayafas, "on infinity," he creates images that hover between abstract and figurative, spooky and commonplace, attractive and unsettling.

My favorites are the most abstract — his "Mandala Series," in which luminous orbs float against the unlikeliest colors, as if the Hubble telescope were hallucinating. Borders are almost imperceptible as a dark, circular blur fades into a surrounding space of charged neon orange. The masks prove similarly haunting, what you might expect to see if The X Files opened an art gallery — weirdly wide-eyed, undifferentiated faces whose very formlessness becomes a visual dare. It’s as if Armstrong were challenging us to ascribe human attributes to these few visible cues.