Rather than diminishing the impact of any piece, however, the mumbling cacophony makes a viewer feel as if she has dozed off, only to awaken in someone else's dream. Neither terrifying, like a child's nightmare, nor sexually charged, like an adolescent's fantasies, the fragmented narratives unfolding in the dimly lighted galleries are as mundane and measured as adult life is meant to be--and as quietly horrifying as it sometimes is.

In the entryway, a pair of free-standing sculptures combines Freud's ideas about narcissism, the unconscious and repression with contemporary video games and traditional folklore. "Untitled (Hair)" is a nearly 5-foot-tall column of braided blond tresses that spins when viewers approach it. Embedded in its top is a video monitor showing a woman who wanders in circles and stares upward, as if from the bottom of a well. If Rapunzel had a sister who was too self-obsessed to even hope for a visit from a lover, this would be her, trapped in a serpentine tangle of hair.

To watch the video in "Untitled (Box)," viewers must lift the lid of a large wooden box that has been mounted on an industrial-strength spring. Here, a theatrical character who could be the evil twin of any of the forest spirits in "A Midsummer Night's Dream" recites a litany of dark desires.

The centerpiece of the show is "Voice off," a two-channel video about a writer who can't concentrate and an opera singer who has lost her voice. On each side of a wall that bisects the gallery, Barry has projected one of two 15-minute videos that run simultaneously.

In the first room, time passes slowly as a middle-aged man taps away at his keyboard, getting up often to smoke cigarettes, drink coffee, read the paper and take a nap. Distracted by muffled noises and siren-like songs, he repeatedly opens the door of his studio to look up and down the hall. Finally, he dismantles a bookshelf and uses a golf club to whack a hole in the wall, which he steps through.

A scrim-covered doorway invites viewers to follow. Having broken through his studio's wall, our frustrated hero finds nothing but mist and silence before the video fades to black.

When the tape loops back to the beginning, we watch as a dozen characters enact a dreamy drama in French and English. From this side of the wall, it becomes apparent that the voices distracting the writer are coming from inside his head--and that whatever he writes fails to keep this madness at bay.

Taking viewers to places we ordinarily wouldn't visit, Barry's multilayered piece of participatory theater suspends us in a queasy nether world, where memories distract and perception turns inward. In contrast, her fourth work consists entirely of rapidly panned landscapes that have been edited in a hyperkinetic fashion. Lacking psychological resonance, this five-channel display doesn't get under your skin as effectively as slower-paced pieces.

A minimalist, nine-foot-square cube, its bottom third mirrored so that the section above seems to float in midair, Imagination, Dead Imagine is a formidable presence in the gallery’s darkened industrial-style space at Bergamot Station. An elaborate digital projection system hidden inside the cube throws onto its translucent faces the uninflected image of a person’s head. On the front of the cube is the face, on its sides the sides of the head, on the back is the back of the head and so on.

The effect is rather unnerving -- this oversize human blockhead, with clammy-looking skin and gender-bending features, is a roiling presence filling the room. The 3D image is actually a composite of individual male and female actors, whose features have been overlaid, one atop the other, and electronically stretched so that they line up.

If not for the video projections, the austere, geometrically perfect piece might easily be mistaken for a Minimalist sculpture from the 1960s. One of Barry’s goals for Imagination, Dead Imagine is to reinsert the human body into Minimal art. Another purpose is to indulge her fascination with Hollywood gore and splatter films, and the action in Imagination, Dead Imagine is nothing if not horrifying.

The poor human head, stretched to unnatural dimensions to begin with, is subjected to one slow-motion sliming after another, first with blood, then urine, then vomit and other substances, all pouring down over the face, into the eyes and mouth and up the nose. There are nine plagues in all, including ones of crickets and worms. The cycle is unending, for after each abject wave is a video "wipe" that restores the head to its pristine state, only to begin its degradation again. It’s like slo-mo splatter-film-as-action-painting.

This baptism by bile is both perverse and disconcerting. Is it an allegory of the human condition? Made in 1991, when the AIDS crisis was still a highly politicized issue, Imagination, Dead Imagine turns typical Hollywood horror-film fare into a profound meditation on death. With its depiction of successive, fresh new faces gradually disintegrating within a coffin-like enclosure, the work recalls nothing so much as the slow mortification of AIDS.

Barry clearly seeks to push her viewers to an extreme encounter with the work. What’s most interesting -- or maybe disturbing -- is that the action, for all its perversity, starts to grow on you, until the horrible series of transgressions comes to seem almost beautiful.

Imagination, Dead Imagine takes its title from a one-paragraph story by Samuel Beckett that tells of a couple trapped in a cubic room. "I wanted to make palpable the reality of that experience," Barry said, "and the idea of that as an allegory for the existential condition."

The second work on view in the gallery is a kinetic sculpture called Untitled (Wing). Part of a 1993 series entitled "Au Bout des Levres" (On the Tip of the Tongue), the work is dedicated to the artist Theresa Cha, who was murdered in 1978. Sitting in the middle of the floor in an otherwise-empty space, Untitled (Wing) shape-shifts between a surly lump of grumbling, flushing plastic and fabric, and a diaphanous, winged creature attempting to take flight.

Again and again, this "creature" readies itself for takeoff and then slumps back into its restive state. The wing’s down time is punctuated by machine-like grunting and grumbling sounds. And, as the work lifts its fabric "wings," hidden projectors send a fleeting torrent of words in light across the dark walls.

Barry and Cha were collaborators, and the writing on the wall comes from a poem they were working on before her death. The words assemble and disappear with dispatch, and it’s hard to get a clear fix on them. "Beyond" appears many times, as if to suggest that flight, actualization or meaning is beyond our grasp.

The wings are shimmering fabric air socks that trail feathery fabric swaths. They attach to a fabric-sheathed plastic sphere that’s two or three feet in diameter and sits on the floor. The sphere contains the mechanisms that animate the piece, which sits dormant until movement in the room triggers a sensor.

The sculpture provokes all kinds of associations, but what is it? Perhaps a failed flying machine. . . or a flightless translucent chicken. . . or a broken, bulbous butterfly. Sometimes it’s surprising that the thing functions at all, and at other times it seems like a jack-in-the-box gag that jumps out to scare you, laying in wait till someone triggers its sensor, causin it to billow forth in a bluster, then collapse. It has the effect of something you see in a dark corner or on the floor of a closet, a scary tremor of movement where there should be stillness.

In any case, Untitled (Wing) is both ugly and beautiful, ridiculous and sublime. An ungainly heap of groaning laundry that is trying to fly, it remains sublime in its aspirations, its dogged attempts to ascend, and its message, however obscurely spelled out, of longing. Given Barry’s inspiration, the piece seems to be an allegory of the mortal coil’s fearsome death rattle and a soul’s ineffable flight.