It is easy enough to read too much into a final show, I think, even if the finality comes as something of a surprise. It must, in the end, be an accident that the last three shows at the Bellevue Art Museum (which will have rather abruptly closed, for financial reasons, by the time you read this) were all about bodies and absence, although it's possible that any exhibition would have felt significantly final, there in the empty echoing halls.

But the installation of Akio Takamori's 12 sleeping figures--thoughtfully scattered, on green straw mats, through a gallery that's also a hallway--nonetheless has the air of an abandoned battlefield. The figures themselves are amazing: both deft and considered, generalized and finely observed (muscles gone slack in sleep, toes gently crossed, an arm tucked up behind a head). This canny installation has a distinctly human feel, but it also manages to invoke the otherworldliness of sleep; the idea of scale has gone random, so that a large baby sleeps next to a much smaller mother. I'm certain that in a room full of people, the sleeping figures would make a longing reference to a kind of unavailable peacefulness; in the absence of human presence it feels somewhat darker.

Takamori's sculptures comprise a third of Clay Body, a lovely understated exhibition curated by Miriam Sternberg. In each artist's case, the clay body as representative of the human body--which in the past has often meant a kind of hopefulness: for the afterlife, for fertility, for order--has an uncanny but more somber resonance in light of current circumstances (BAM's afterlife, at present, is quite uncertain). Claudia Fitch's upside-down Buddhas, embedded in ornate chandelier-style sculptures, gave the gallery a cockeyed temple feel, both solemn and joyful, like a suppressed laugh. Patti Warashina's Real Politique, a curious circus sideshow of figures that are said to represent the artist's political views, are, in their patent oddity (a circular-saw tutu, a body that's an internment camp watchtower, an exclamation point that's a head), less freakish than emotionally accurate, little symbolic stand-ins for the real thing.

The contrast between present and missing bodies becomes more pronounced upstairs in Lucy Orta's Nexus Architecture + Connector IV. Orta's work is predicated on ideas of shelter and survival for people in marginal circumstances such as refugees, the homeless--as in a house that's not much more than a bivvy sack--but much of Orta's invention has as much to do with linking people, protectively, one feels, as with sheltering them. Full-body suits (that bear more than a passing resemblance to HAZMAT gear) are connected to each other by tubes that resemble arteries, and so may be read as vital. In Nexus Architecture x 50, there are 50 silver suits, with heart (biological, not symbolic) images on the wrong side of the body, connected on all sides by these links. The 50 people wearing this object, one imagines, must quickly arrive at a consensus about how to move about--a real stab at community-building, rather than the empty gestures usually made in that direction. In the catalogue for this exhibition there's an amazing photograph of Nexus Architecture x 50 being inhabited in front of the cathedral at Köln, but at BAM the suits hang limp and empty, suggesting life but also pinpointing the lack of it. The feel is distinctly apocalyptic--either survival planned for the big event, or perhaps come too late.

Phil Roach's contribution to the series Nest is a living room that's like one of his tiny dioramas: a living room that seems to have been recently left, with clothes tossed on the couch, a messy pile of newspapers, and a radio that someone left on. But Roach lets us know that human presence is not the only presence that counts; some of the furniture and accessories in the room bear his signature peepholes, through which you view something that may or may not be the object's inner life (the pile of newspapers has something of a surprise for you). Roach has given a more or less anonymous and abandoned room a mingled sadness and potential that make a fitting farewell to this failed museum.