Lisa Hoke at Elizabeth Harris

Lisa Hoke and her assistants spent a lot of time attaching a profusion of plastic and paper cups to a 75-foot sequence of the gallery's 11-foot-high walls for The Gravity of Color (2004), a sprawling, low-tech mosaic that had the main space to itself.

Screwed to the wall in snaking, segmented bands, thousands of small, clear plastic cups, each containing a splash of a single pigment, suggested an overall pattern but avoided an explicit one. Instead, they staked out spectral territory; distinct regions were dominated by a variety of reds, or pale earth colors, or blues, greens and magentas of a similar value. Protrusions erupting here and there consisted of commercially printed paper cups--to which the mixed colors were keyed--glued together and telescoping off the wall by as much as 3 feet. The piece engaged two corners, where these build-outs meshed, elaborately and delicately. The drama of arrested motion has long been a characteristic of the artist's work; that theme was carried out here in the conspicuous screwheads, one per cup, which visually punctuated the piece and insistently refuted the suggestion of coiling, writhing movement. Still, there was a bit of fun in imagining that the array mimicked the instability of stockpiled cups, suggesting an Elizabeth Murrayesque household incident.

Prolonged viewing was rewarded by the discovery of details such as a swarm of little round mirrors and a quartet of mismatched parfait glasses glued rim-side to the wall. But ultimately the element of showmanship dominated, the sheer effort on display overwhelming the result.

More succinct and successful was A Splendid Order (2004), another hybrid of painting, sculpture and installation, which shared the gallery's smaller space with four mid-size works of glued painted-paper reliefs under glass. Here the components were far fewer but their spatial and chromatic interrelatedness made for a rich, memorable experience. Eleven roughhewn Plexiglas cubes, varying in size from 10 to 15 inches square, were streaked and striped with spindly or luscious drips of clean, unequivocal color pairings, arranged at right angles: dark green and pale blue, red and orange, hot pink and vibrant blue. The cubes were suspended in space, roughly equidistant and at jaunty, buoyant angles, linked to the walls and ceiling by means of spiky chains made of plastic electrical ties in chipper industrial colors, to which some of the paint had been matched. The impulse to walk around and among these tumbling, tethered dice was irresistible. The scale was just right, and the visual heft of the piece relative to its economy of means was extraordinary.

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