By Hannah Martin, News Staff

Walking into the Mills Gallery on Tremont Street, it’s hardly clear if the exhibit has been fully installed. Televisions and wet floor signs and plants sit haphazardly about stark white rooms. There’s a sense of disarray, a sense that something’s missing. Where exactly is the art?
But after meandering from one room to the next and back again, cohesion emerges, and the installations clarify what’s missing:’ you.
‘Things Of That Nature,’ on display at the gallery until June 7, features the projects of eight Massachusetts Institute of Technology graduate students in the Visual Arts Program. These are not standalone pieces, but’ perplexing fragments of what seem like ordinary things speaking their message through the human interaction they incite or contain.
Some installations call for direct interaction with the gallery’s observers, while others display filmed reactions from another public space. Nothing is one-dimensional. Instead, the bizarre, multi-faceted nature of the exhibit sets viewers on an engaging excavation through sounds, images and objects and the ideas behind them, each artist presenting a cohesive message.
Take Jess Wheelock’s project. On the screen of a small TV, a woman struggles with an enormous stack of books wobbling under an unsteady grasp. Her teetering plays continuously on the film, but a horn below invites viewers to squeeze, causing catastrophic noise and a cascade of books.
On another television, a woman holds two burning birthday candles end to end, struggling not to singe her fingers with melting wax. Her strain continues until an adventurous spectator pulls the fire alarm below, dousing the woman with water and extinguishing the flames.
Wheelock’s works explore these banal everyday disasters and struggles with a distinct punch irony.
Some spectators appear apprehensive at first. They watch the characters strain until realizing they have the final say. They must go beyond simple observation, and personally generate that final note of calamity.
A similar apprehension is inherent with Jin Jung’s installation, contained in each of the gallery’s columns and instructed by a self-assembled manual.
Cardboard covers are available at the door that read ‘A Play:’ Between Me and You,’ and at each of the gallery’s columns are additional pages with instructions. They invite participants to assess interpersonal relationships through their interactions with each column:’ lean on one, rub another, move another ‘- should I really be moving this?
Jaekyung Jung’s play with human interaction examines human behavior in the public sphere, provoking participants and onlookers to question notions of social normality.
One installation displays a base drum with taped-on letters that read ‘hit here if you feel victimized’ in capital letters, inviting the public to release their inner pain through intense percussive drumming. Above the instrumental symbol, film clips show the drum being paraded around Chinatown and the Boston Common.
In another, two films reel on opposing white walls. Each features a man walking aimlessly around Boston with a large mirror strapped to his body, presenting human reactions to the bizarre situation.
Gina Badger’s installation, titled ‘Not Necessarily Deeper,’ takes the element of human interaction the furthest of all the pieces with a three-dimensional bibliography of her research in radical urban ecology.
At first glance, it appears to be only a shelf of books on gardening, ecology and politics, positioned next to a strange door. Some viewers hesitate, wondering whether this is part of the exhibit. A sign on the door directs them inside, one at a time. Walking down the long dusty hallway, it’s like being in the junk closet of someone’s garage. More books are interspersed between dust and plywood and buckets of paint. At the end are two folding chairs, inviting participants to dig into Badger’s subject of study through one of the many books from her bibliography.
More bizarre installations pepper the gallery ‘- an insertion module that turns into a portable tearoom, plants grown and nourished with an artists’ blood, the aesthetic recreation of a wind tunnel ‘- all of which tell the viewer ‘come into this work of art and experience it, don’t simply look from afar.’
Ultimately, ‘Things of That Nature’ is more like the children’s section of the science museum and less like an art exhibit. It’s fun, exciting even ‘- an unearthing of the artists’ ideas by inserting oneself into them. There are no ‘do not touch’ signs, no keeping your hands to yourself. Through participating in each installation the viewer gets a short glimpse into the artist’s brain, and for that instance, the spectator becomes the art.
‘Things of That Nature’ runs until June 7 at the Mills Gallery in the Boston Center for the Arts at 539 Tremont St.