Two shows currently on view remind us of how wonderfully enveloping installation art can be.

For a little while, these works subsume viewers in an alternate reality, a space conceived by a particular mind that thinks in the round — not just one- or two-dimensionally. We could even argue that they go beyond three-dimensionality by making us part of the work itself.

At Sidle House Gallery in Freeport are several installations within an old barn, collectively called “InSTALLations” (through July 19). At the Langlais Art Preserve in Cushing, “Forest Geometries” is five sculptures placed along forest trails adjacent to the late Bernard Langlais’ studio and home (on view through spring 2026).

For “InSTALLations,” seven artists created environments in the barn’s livestock stalls and in the vaulted central space. Entering the latter, we find ourselves in “Grand Ballroom,” by Brunswick-based artist Ian Trask. A biologist by education who became an artist after taking a job as a hospital groundskeeper, Trask is well known for works that “interrupt the waste stream.” That is, he uses discarded manufactured goods, often bundling them into hundreds of spherical shapes of varying size and employing them as components he suspends in space to create sculptures and environments that are sometimes immersive.

At Sidle House, Trask takes over the barn’s central corridor, utilizing its double-height ceiling and monumental proportions to suggest the arched mirrors lining a ballroom and the enormous chandelier that would hover at its center. All of this is done with the aforementioned spheres — 610 of them to be precise — hung from the supporting post-and-beam framework that crisscrosses the barn and outlines the hayloft bays.

The sheer labor-intensive process alone leaves you reeling. But Trask has also done something extraordinary: By using simple lines created by the placement of these spheres, he suggests familiar objects, leaving our minds to conjure a ghost-like image of a luxurious, glittering ballroom that almost obliterates the actual humbleness of his materials and transforms it into something the emanates a sense of grandeur and beauty. The spheres also evoke constellations and heavenly orbits.

Another installation, “Reverence,” is by Samantha Rand, a Freeport artist who succumbed to cancer hours before the opening of the show and, so, never saw it in situ. The piece was re-created by friends and family working from photos.

Begun as a reaction against humanity’s endless appetite for consumption and waste, she dug deep inside herself to “examine my own role in this.” Silk flowers, a Buddha figurine, party fringes, a picture of the Dalai Lama surrounded by an aureole of pearl-tipped stick pins (the piece is dedicated to his profound influence on Rand’s life), old fabrics, notions, miniature pom poms — this dense accretion of bits and bobs adds up to a boisterous, colorful expression of this late artist’s attitude toward life, which, she described in her wall label as “my lifelong M.O. of coming from a place of joy, not negativity.”

It is also about memory and the literal “stuff” of life. Within the context of Rand’s passing, the installation blends poignancy and her apparent joy.

Nearby is “Field of Flying Point,” an homage to Rand in the form of a large muslin curtain cut into lacy patterns of flowers and hung diagonally in the stall. At the bottom, these blooms are painted in bright shades using watercolor pastels, beginning at the floor where the curtain puddles and proceeding about a third of the way up the fabric. At that point, the foliate forms become just black, as if obscured under the penumbra of an enormous tree.

The blackened plant life suggests the passing of this vegetation as it withers, dies and returns to the earth. Together with the colorful blossoms, the composition intimates cycles of growth and decay, life and death. Paired with this reality of Rand’s own passing, the piece takes on a melancholic, mournful beauty.

Ashley Page’s “Beyond the North Star” is an assemblage of works she made at the Women’s Studio Workshop on a recent residency there. The corridor running behind the barn stalls is garlanded with foraged plant life, under which Page has created scenes of Black life. A woman dressed in furs and finery that recalls the Black society portraits of James van der Zee stands against a background image of what appears to be a bayou, simultaneously suggesting the troubling history of Black experience in the South and the flowering of Black art and literature during the Harlem Renaissance.

In another, hands reach up toward two men in a boat, seemingly invoking, perhaps, those lost during the Middle Passage. Laundry flapping on a line before what looks like a quilt with stitched designs speaks to quotidian pastimes in the communities established in their new home.

All these images Page encircles with rings of braided synthetic hair and with other materials (rice, for example) that invoke historical cultural symbols, not least of which is the base material: pigmented cotton pulp. The cumulative effect is a feeling of the richness of the Black experience throughout centuries, its persistence through trials and tragedy, the way resilience led to the establishment of community in a land whose shores proved alien and life-threatening for thousands of Africans, and their deep connection to the land — for sustenance, of course, but also for the succor and mystical resonance emanating from the forest and water spirits revered by African religions.

Other installations are, by turns, reverent references to the woods (Justine Lasdin’s “A Year of Trees”), the magical creatures that live there (the fairies of Erin Bundock’s “The Bridge”) and peace doves whose material makeup raised questions about human impact on our ecology (Kate Gerwig’s “Paved by Good Intentions”).

FORMS IN NATURE

The Langlais Art Preserve is known to many as the site of the home and studio of beloved sculptor Bernard Langlais, which showcases a variety of his whimsical animal sculptures, an enormous torso and head of Richard Nixon emerging from a swampy area, a two-story sculpture of Christina Olsen, the disabled subject of Andrew Wyeth’s iconic painting “Christina’s World,” and more.

But also currently on view is the preserve’s first major contemporary art installation, “Forest Geometries,” which takes the form of five sculptures set along a new 2.3-mile trail within the 60-acre property. The installation is by Massachusetts-based multidisciplinary artist and woodworker Gina Siepel, who has long been interested in environmentally based works that involve copious research (in this case of the local ecology) before even beginning to put a work together.

At Langlais, Siepel pairs her interest in the study of place with Plato’s Theory of Forms, a philosophy that postulates that reality is actually made of forms that underly all manifestation and are repeated, imitated and simulated throughout everything that we perceive and mistake for actual reality.

Five of these forms are the basis for the sculptures Siepel created from fallen spruce, balsam fir and maple saplings gathered, “in an ecologically respectful manner,” according to Siepel, from the woods. This has a synchronicity with Langlais’ own works, which were made of found wood as well, though they could not be more different. Covered in milk paint and hemp oil, they are erected on barely perceptible steel supports.

The Platonic solids within Plato’s theory represented various elements: “Tetrahedron” was fire, “Cube” earth, “Octahedron” air, “Icosahedron” water and “Dodecahedron” the cosmos. Their placement (based on the relation of form and phenomena — i.e., the dodecahedron sits in a clearing exposed to the sky) creates a sense of surprise and discovery as we come upon them around a bend in the trail, up on a rock ledge or enclosing a small stand of young trees.

Spending time with them reveals how these forms are repeated in the flora around us. For instance, “Icosahedron” reminds us of the mountain laurel flower, and the red pyramidal shape of “Tetrahedron” evokes a campfire. Their material and their relationship to surrounding vegetation and phenomena give them a profound sense of “belonging” to the landscape, though Plato might characterize it as the building blocks of actual reality that create that landscape.

We feel their presence and solidity in a palpably organic, essential way. The fundamental nature of their forms also creates a tension between what we might interpret as their inherent geometric abstraction and a landscape we might interpret as representational.

Our experience of them becomes holistic and beyond merely visual, encompassing other senses like sound (birds, crickets, frogs), smell (wet earth, the resiny tang of wood and bark), touch (rain or breeze on our skin) and even taste (the moist air we inhale and exhale).

Jorge S. Arango has written about art, design and architecture for over 35 years. He lives in Portland and can be reached at jorge@jsarango.com. This column is supported by The Dorothea and Leo Rabkin Foundation.

IF YOU GO

WHAT: “InSTALLations”
WHERE: Sidle House Gallery, 20 Bartol Island Road, Freeport
WHEN: Through July 19
HOURS: 3-6 p.m. Thursday to Saturday
ADMISSION: Free
INFO: 512-771-1149, sidlehouse.com

WHAT: “Forest Geometries”
WHERE: Langlais Art Preserve, 576 River Road, Cushing
WHEN: Through spring 2026
HOURS: From dawn until dusk daily
ADMISSION: Suggested admission of $10 for non-Cushing residents
INFO: 207-594-5166, langlaisartpreserve.org