Three years ago, Los Angeles artist Carlos Mollura gave a slide presentation to a group of artists and other art-world types in the Wright Exhibition Space, along with artist George Stoll (also from L.A.) and Chris Bruce, then the curator of the Experience Music Project. It was an evening of odd claims, one of which was Bruce's long justification of EMP's collection as art, which no one--to my knowledge--had challenged, telling us that all objects of art are only containers for meaning supplied by others. There was an abrupt noise (perhaps the sound of 100 artists' jaws dropping, or perhaps just an audible gasp), and then silence.

Mollura's presentation was also baffling--at one point he claimed to have purged all references from his work, which is impossible, of course (you can't control the allusive mind of the audience, right?), but which was also one of those statements whose truth content is very hard to unpack. It's like boasting about being stupid. At any rate, these two claims, Bruce's and Mollura's, were clattering around in my mind as I looked at Mollura's current exhibition at the Bellevue Art Museum, and they were not, shall we say, irrelevant. There are currently nine of these works in the atrium of Stephen Holl's light-catching museum, and they turn out to provide a fine occasion for questions of meaning, of vessel-ness, and of references--to art, to site, to audience.

Mollura makes a steady inquiry into the idea of taking up space, with inflated sculptures built of PVC film and polyurethane, some on a human scale, some quite a bit larger, some transparent, some cloudy, some colored, some black. One of the slides he showed in 1999 was of a ceiling he had lowered by creating an inflated baffle: transparent, so you could still see the ceiling, but definitely and obviously changing the space, making it either more intimate or more claustrophobic, depending on what kind of person you were. This is not particularly an issue in BAM's enormous lobby; one of the older works, a giant black vinyl orb, dense and dark, absorbing all the light around it while other works are busy throwing light around, is placed on a stair landing, not exactly in the way, but almost--like the thing in the room everyone is aware of but doesn't want to talk about.

How brave would it be to place such an object so that you had to turn sideways and squeeze by? But challenging the space doesn't seem to be primarily on anyone's mind in this installation, although I did nearly do a header right into a guy coming around a big cloudy floor-to-ceiling pillar. Aside from the big black death star, the work is bright and beachy: a happy, disorderly pile of bright, edgeless rectangles--the incandescent blue, yellow, and red of pool toys--stuffed into the big window that overlooks Bellevue Way, a couple of striped mattress things on the wall, some inflated plastic "paintings," one with a nozzle cleverly drawing back the veil on both method and phenomenology (breath makes the painting literally come out to you, and you breathe life into it; Bruce meets Mollura meets Bruce).

The most stun- ning piece is a pair of clusters of about 100 capsules that form something like chandeliers. When I looked down and saw the deep reflection of these clusters in the lobby floor, they looked like sea plants, struggling up from the ocean floor on delicate stems. There is a kind of sea-life/poolside feeling to the exhibition, but I think it would be a mistake (and I bet Mollura would think so, too) to see it as a wholesale transformation into an aquarium. It is more a set of objects that inquire into the nature of the museum space itself, the combination of natural and artificial light (both deliberate and accidental) that it requires, the meandering way that people move through it. You learn your way around Mollura's impediments to Holl's architecture. You negotiate, and renegotiate.

The works were not created specifically for this atrium, but they respond to it because of the way they take up space and reshape it. In spite of themselves, they ignite references. They are literally containers. But they are hardly empty.