'Kia Neill: Terrain'

'Kia Neill: Terrain'

Women & Their Work, 1710 Lavaca, 477-1064, www.womenandtheirwork.org

Through Feb. 27

Houston artist Kia Neill, responsible for having turned entire art venues into glittering, glowing caves and grottoes in which you wouldn't be surprised to find the fossil remains of a Sleestak, now gives the Women & Their Work Art Gallery the geological-fantasy treatment with a less claustrophobic creation, called Terrain. Neill uses a diversity of materials to construct her eerie, shimmering otherscape: chicken wire, papier mâché, shattered CDs, plaster, rhinestones, paint, glitter, oh, the list goes on, as does this beautiful Terrain, taking over the gallery's interior, accessible past a wall and curtains that provide the darkness from which embedded lights, reflected from kaleidoscopic shards of recycled CDs and filtered through cattywampus lattices of wire, flicker in complex patterns, in a fractured rainbow of colors.

It's so dark in there among the artificial hills and stalagmitic risers, you get the feeling of having entered the land of faery while simultaneously flying into LAX late at night, the City of Angels' sprawling grid disrupted by seismic and volcanic events and eroded by centuries of fey weather. This, you could imagine, is what the inside of Bat for Lashes' Natasha Khan's head looks like. Or the parts of fantasy writer Neil Gaiman's head that aren't yet papered with royalty statements and divorce decrees. Or maybe the artist's own head, of course, she being the force that moved the hands that worked the matter that rendered this compelling glimpse of elsewhere.

You go to a different place like this, you tourist your way through an eldritch land so far removed from where there are banks and courts and mundane quotidia, it could be that you'd also want a souvenir to prove your visit. Neill has provided several such objects for the enchanted public: Her "geodes" and "crystals" and other objects made from the same stuff (art materials, recycled media, craft-enhanced whimsy) as the installed Terrain are available, piece by piece, although the price is somewhat more dear than most gift-shop relics. Stopping by the gallery for a look-see into this fantasmaspeleological installation, though, will cost you nothing but an enhanced sense of wonder – which we earthily recommend.