ONE GUY SHOWS a huge inflatable vinyl sculpture; the other shows a pair of metal tanks centered in a room. The less you have in front of you, the more your thoughts can play over it -- that's the concept. The object, which appears straightforward, describable in sum using a single sentence, should open out in your head into multiple paragraphs of sensation, emotion, logic, art, and/or theory. At least one hopes; otherwise, one is left with whatever the lump of stuff in front of you actually is, which is generally not much.

Carlos Mollura has no problem creating that bloom in a viewer's mind. This month at James Harris, he shows us a single, room-filling object and a few small works in back. The large object, Untitled (2000), is an inflated cube of PVC, its bottom half opaque black, its top clear, wedged into the corner of the room and extending out so as to leave only a narrow corridor through to the back spaces of the gallery. Other viewers may get other things out of Mollura's work, but the first thing that pops into my head is "Moon Bounce," as in those inflated fair-ground attractions where kids get black eyes. There's plenty else going on in his work -- particularly the play between a perfect abstract form (the cube) and the necessary distortion of that form (bowed sides, soft corners) imposed by Mollura's medium.

Mollura flirts with emptiness in his large-scale works, which were previously seen here as part of CoCA's show of new art from Los Angeles. His work is broadly minimalist, but is specifically reminiscent of a Californian variant of that idea. Mollura's objects recall "Light and Space" artists who formed around the strong personality of Robert Irwin. Irwin used subtle, generally transparent or translucent materials (florescent lighting tubes, glass, scrims) to subtly alter the white cube spaces of galleries and museums. In this work, the actual art objects become less important than the transformation of the space where they're installed, and the aesthetic experience of the viewer.

Which is all well and good for Mollura -- art historical sensibilities being an important ingredient in art that wishes to be taken seriously by high-end institutions and high-end art critics. Still, it's kind of beside the point. Mollura's sculptures and wall works, spare and analytical as they may be, look fun. They even smell fun, reminding one of all the other things made of this material: records, raincoats, beach balls, inflatable rafts, garden hoses. Probably some kinds of bondage gear, too. Depending on your personal experiences, Mollura's work should remind you of one or all of these things.

Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle's work doesn't look like fun, but a lot of a certain sort of fun had to happen for the work to exist. Onanism, masturbation, jerking off -- call it what you will, it's still the primary method we technologically savvy humans have for creating sperm samples, which is what Manglano-Ovalle's current installation at the Henry is about.

Manglano-Ovalle has borrowed samples from a few dozen people (many of them well-known contemporary artists) and had them split by a lab into bearers of X genes and Y genes -- girl and boy sperm. The two cryotanks they're stored in have either pink or baby-blue lids, the only visible evidence that they are not just empty, off-the-rack items that could be found in any good high-end medical supply store.

Around the liquid-nitrogen-filled tanks are a selection of the contracts the artist's firm, Banks in Pink and Blue, has drawn up for the participants, as well as for the University of Washington (the Henry's operator) and the Washington state district attorney's office. The artist and the museum hope the following issues will thereby commence swimming around viewers' heads: questions of ownership, storage, archiving, reproductive technology, genetic engineering, eugenics, gender, legal issues, minimalist art, formalism, and conceptualism. Instead, I felt a cold remove from the sleek-surfaced objects, which archive, basically, a series of ejaculations, as if an onanistic orgy had been preserved for eternity, placed in suspended animation. Someone else's fun creates my minimalist art object. Some trade.