I'VE BEEN THINKING a lot about shock value lately, since I seem to run into it everywhere. I have decided that shock has value if it makes you look twice, and, the second time, you look more carefully. Damien Hirst's dissected and preserved creatures have shock value. The result of your second look is close observation of something you think you already know -- what a cow looks like, and of something you didn't expect to see -- what the inside of a cow looks like.

It is not only shocking things that make you look twice, but also anxious and vaguely menacing things, like the objects by Susan Robb showing at the Pound Gallery this month, in an installation called Weatheradio, 3200: Handmade Genetics and Homestyle Plastic.

Robb has a knack for mixing materials to produce a disquieting effect. She wraps latex around a plum-sized ball of (real) fur, and attaches it to the wall with a silicone tail. Inside this blind and bandaged creature is a photograph of other contrasting materials: in this case Play-Doh and fake fur, like fungus displayed on a polar-bear rug. The object is touchable and repellent all at once. Her "polyps" series is fashioned out of a milky, skinlike epoxy resin, and suggests -- even if you haven't noticed the title -- biology out of control.

Robb has situated her objects in a forest of fake trees, populated with the likes of a plastic Easter bunny emanating weather-radio sounds and a tiny zebra atop a blow-up pillow. The effect is a multi-layered investigation of nature and artifice.

What Robb illustrates here is how far removed we are from our bodies, how artificial even the most natural things can seem. The feedback from the weather radio is a kind of abstraction from nature, and the Easter bunny is an example of how an animal has become a vessel for so many other meanings (Robb points out that it is associated with, among other things, fecundity, Playboy, and chemical testing) that the animal itself almost ceases to exist. Robb wagers that in this age of ironic post-everything, we're so conscious of subconscious meaning that we can't see the actual object. The presence of the viewer's biological body in a constructed forest is the period at the end of the sentence: One's own discomfort in this unnatural natural environment illustrates Robb's point quite nicely.

Jesse Paul Miller's objects are more the product of the happy accident, a mix of intuition and the materials he happens to have at hand. In an exhibit called Millers Crossing (which he shares with the painter Sean Miller) at Howard House, Miller shows assemblages of cast-off objects he compulsively collects, then alters. His interest in his materials is what is most salient -- how they work, what effects they produce -- and several of the pieces he admits are a kind of ars poetica, an explanation of his process. One of these is a site-specific construction made for this exhibit: a record player placed on the floor, displayed with one of Miller's own drawings; a found cassette; and the cover of a polka record from the '50s, stained with a yellow paint that makes the polka dancers glow like they've been irradiated. When the turntable is on, the record -- silk-screened with the image of a tree -- produces a scratchy noise; the needle skips and skids over the surface, unsure of where to go. Here is a microcosm of Miller's art: found objects recombined to make a work that is both compelling and grating.

Miller's objects are visually arresting, such as a disc cast in translucent resin from a mold made from an LP. The disc contains recording tape swirled inside, and Miller told me that the tape contained sounds from his past. Like Robb's work, this object suggests layers of meaning vis à vis the creation of art: cast from an original piece of art, containing a tape no one can hear that was taken from another (disassembled) object, all made into something quite new. Contemplating this gave me a lovely dizzy feeling.

Assaulted as we are by visual images these days, we begin to assume a demo- cracy of images: All of them are equally unimportant. Some artists slice up cows to convince us otherwise, and some, like Robb and Miller, work in more subtle ways. Their patient explorations of biology and technology are a good crash course in the contemporary anxious object.