For an artist whose specialty is her response to place, what would otherwise be a prize—a touring museum exhibition—is a mixed blessing. The better part of Maya Lin's installations at the Henry Art Gallery is a piece called Water Line. To create it, she banished thoughts of travel and tussled instead with permanent structure, responding to the museum's most challenging gallery (a tall and malformed room at the bottom of the stairs) by installing a two-story, three-dimensional aluminum-tubing outline in the shape of a real underwater mountain, like a computer model floating in space.

Because it is permeable and dips low as well as rises high, you can stand inside Water Line as though you were planted waist-deep in the mountain, or you can view it from the second-floor balcony, whose grade represents the water line where the mountain pokes out as an island. The installation is transporting, and yet feels like it couldn't be installed anywhere else—plus, it's the best use of that space that I've seen.

The show's title is Systematic Landscapes because Lin designed the works by filtering landforms through technologies, such as computer modeling and sonar viewing. These "systematic" approaches represent a cross between documentation and alteration, between the deference it takes to care about the land and the chutzpah it takes to sculpt it.

Richard Andrews, the Henry's director, placed Lin in an esteemed tradition by inviting her to create this show, following the landmark exhibitions the Henry has commissioned from installation artists Ann Hamilton and James Turrell. Yet temporary, non-site-specific exhibitions are not Lin's strength. She has had three solo museum shows in her 25-year career, but her most noted contributions to American art are outside cultural institutions, in large-scale, lasting interventions in architectural and natural environments.She cracked open a wall in a Des Moines office building to run a stream through it. She erected a raised line like a fallen string on the cow pasture of a Swedish arts foundation. It all began with her famously ambivalent, self-sustaining Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., in 1982: wound and bandage, void and mirror.

In the broadest terms, Lin's project is to encourage consideration of lands and waters forgotten. She stages contemplation using a quietude that can develop into slow-burning fascination, as with landscape reliefs inserted into drywall at the Henry, or can suffer from pseudo-scientific muteness, as with her straightforward models of seas.

The Henry show is intended to bridge Lin's outdoor installations and her more studio-based museum works, to present enveloping experiences instead of sculptural objects. The largest of the installations—and the piece the show will be remembered for—is 2x4 Landscape, an almost cartoonishly steep bump evocative of a hill or a wave rising from a floor plane. Made of 65,000 cut boards, it is beautiful in a quiet, repetitive, visually dissolving way. Using architectural materials to abstract a natural form is a reminder about the inevitability of human intervention in landscape.

But 2x4 Landscape has a major problem: It practically begs you to walk on it, but unless you fill out a waiver to get a supervised slot during extremely limited hours, you can only pace the narrow paths at its perimeter. Lin had envisioned total access, and this intrusive paternalism (echoing the "open" hours of a public park) interrupts what she had in mind. It took several months and a crew of workers to build 2x4 Landscape, yet somehow the details weren't worked out in advance.

Finally, 2x4 Landscape is squeezed into a room too short for it. While the piece was being fabricated in a South Lake Union warehouse, the bump had a longer tail, which made the rise to the summit more regal. Its tail was shortened in the gallery (was this, too, not measurable earlier?) to make room for Blue Lake Pass, the third and final major commissioned installation.

Blue Lake Pass is a topographical representation of a real mountain range made from particleboard, segmented into a grid of mountain chunks with aisles for walking "in" the mountains. Unlike Water Line, this attempt to wed imagined perspectives with physical experience is overly literal and blunt. Its vivisection may be an environmental statement about isolation and destruction—Lin's work is more pragmatic than, for instance, the artificial landscapes of Tara Donovan or, locally, Leo Saul Berk or Claude Zervas—but ultimately, it's impossible to read this impassive terrain. By contrast, Lin's clearest work is a communicative part of a contextual whole, a gesture that makes place within place. recommended