ART - Clarity in every crisis - Charles Gaines probes larger-than-life phenomena to explore the nature of human truth and understanding.

"Greenhouse" is a microcosm of the city in an 8-by-12-foot wood and Plexiglas structure. A computer-controlled system of multicolored lights shines down on a satellite photo of the L.A. basin; each color represents a different airborne pollutant. If regional air pollution levels are low, the lights get brighter; if levels increase, they grow dim. Every 15 minutes, the computer receives data from a website that records local air quality and the structure fills with fog, diffusing the lights in a cloud of haze.

While the installation is a high-tech dramatization of environmental degradation, it is also part of Gaines' ongoing investigation into how we comprehend all phenomena, not just moments of crisis. "My interest is not to necessarily be an agent in changing global warming," he says. "Although I would love for that to happen, my interest is to produce a certain kind of understanding of the role that ideology can play in limiting your thinking."

For Gaines, cataclysmic events strain our powers of comprehension. And by rendering us speechless, they show us the limits of our ability to make sense of the world. Gaines is interested in the gap between visceral experience and the words and theories we use to describe it.

One of his best-known works, 1997's "Airplanecrash Clock," depicts a catastrophe on a small scale. Hoisted above a model of a fictional metropolis (a mishmash of iconic buildings from different cities), a toy airplane on the end of a long pole descends at regular intervals into a trap door in the street. After each "crash," we hear screams, and the door flips over to reveal the plane's wreckage. The work turns tragedy into a repetitive, mechanical event, much like the repeated media footage of planes crashing into the World Trade Center towers on Sept. 11, 2001.

"The piece was done before 9/11, but it felt eerily prescient." says Shelly Bancroft, co-director of New York art center Triple Candie, where Gaines had a retrospective in 2004. By calling attention to the ways in which disasters are represented, Gaines asserts that our understanding of events is always a particular construction of language and images rather than objective truth.