Barbara Weissberger's "DID YOU FIND EVERYTHING YOU WERE LOOKING FOR TODAY?" is among the installations in the "Gestures" exhibit at the Mattress Factory. Click photo for larger image.

When the "Gestures" exhibitions re-emerged at the Mattress Factory last month, I wondered whether the series could sustain itself. Having seen the current edition, the answer is an emphatic "Yes!"

Described as featuring "small-scale site-specific work by artists from a variety of backgrounds and disciplines," the shows expanded upon standard exhibition concepts by including people not traditionally thought of as artists to produce work in a venue already known for its outside-the-box attitude.

Among the professions past exhibitors have represented are dancer, librarian, theatrical director, chef and Zen Buddhist monk.

The exhibitions are co-curated by Mattress curator of exhibitions Michael Olijnyk and independent curator and art critic Graham Shearing. Each show has approximately 10 exhibitors drawn, significantly, from a regional pool.

This is the sixth such exhibition and the first to be held in the museum proper rather than its 1414 Monterey St. Annex.

When it debuted in 2001, "Gestures" seemed to be a promising novelty, but that came with the presumption that the shows would probably have the limited life span that the title implies.

However, rather than collapse under its own weightlessness -- the title's implication being that these are quickly, though not thoughtlessly, sketched works -- the series' subsequent editions have shown staying power.

Like a monthly book club, the shows advance the conversation established in earlier sessions through varying formats. A sparked dialogue on a variety of issues that runs parallel to the visual objects displayed is as interesting as the art itself, at times more so.

Some questions encompass broader cultural considerations, while others are inherent to this kind of exhibition: What constitutes art, or museums? What is the role of artist, or art, in the 21st century? Has installation art played out? Most apparently, where does one draw the line around "artist"?

By today's measure, does an exhibition comprising work, for example, by an architect, industrial designer, window dresser, gardener, photojournalist, self-taught rural painter, commercial illustrator and cartoonist include anything not done by an "artist"?

This dialogic element does not suggest that the artwork itself is throw-away. At times it is surprisingly -- as in surpassing imagination, not as in didn't-think-it-could-happen -- good.

Perhaps the most rewarding unspoken achievement is that the nature of selection for, participation in and creation of "Gestures," I believe, mimics the early, heady days of the museum itself -- before it had earned a reputation as an internationally acclaimed museum of installation art. Before it regularly attracted high-profile artists. Before mainstream art world professionals began coming to learn how to start a similar institution. Before its large annual exhibitions were internationally themed and drew on expressions from China, Eastern Europe and, most recently, Cuba.

Because the stakes are higher now for exhibitors in the major fall shows, the art is more careful, more imbued with the responsibility to live up to venue and acclaimed colleagues.

If the players on the main stage have matured, then "Gestures" brings in the grandchildren, re-invigorating the house with a less disciplined sense of wonder and adventure, sizzling with the unpredictability that distinguished the renegade institution in its beginnings nearly 30 years ago. The audience loved it then, and that same energy of nose-thumbing rebellion infuses these shows.

It's a given, because of the show's thesis, that works will be experimental and therefore some will be more successful than others. But the overall experience consistently remains refreshing, and often challenging.

In the current show, for example, simply entering the gallery that holds Ed Parrish's "Infant Stars of a Flora Cloud Formation" and Barbara Weissberger's "DID YOU FIND EVERYTHING YOU WERE LOOKING FOR TODAY?" lifts one into a curious realm that fires the imagination.

Her oversized hamburger with flurry of pickle chips covers a wall, its fixings dripping onto the floor, initiating thoughts of health and environment. It's sobering that it's such an embedded cultural emblem that each component may be easily read by color and sketchy suggestion.

His trailings of pink spheres bubble from a blue circle on the ceiling and sprawl across the room, serving up carefully rendered platters of mini-worlds, speaking to possibilities and dreams. Or not -- they're your stories to complete.

Stepping off the elevator the visitor is eye-level with the buttocks and genitalia of the dozen larger-than-life, generic male figures of Thommy Conroy's "Yes, let's go," whose fleshy vitality contrasts with the few dusty accouterments of a staid middle-class interior they're paired with. The queue they form suggests conscription, concentration camps and gas chambers; the postures, classical art, perhaps religious art if the slumped central figure is interpreted as Christ and the 11 surrounding men, minus a Judas, his apostles.

The title of fashion designer Nami Ogawa's spectral sculpture -- a hooded full-length garment disassembling into a train of tatters and spheres -- translates as "spirit is separating from your actual body and taking off," which is a mouthful of concept on its own. The singular sagging opening below waist front in this otherwise rigorously stitched and almost constricting costume seems to make additional commentary on gender and sexuality.

An exceptional work -- made more so by its understated quality -- is "P.O.V." by SO-AD (David Burns' and Abigail Hart Gray's architectural and design practice), a minimalist grid that transforms a doorway, playing with issues of architecture, space, perspective ("points of view"), even the positioning of the lenses through which one sees the world.

Writer boice-Terrel Allen innovatively constructed visual abstracts of passages from two forthcoming volumes for "The Rattlecat Museum: an Exhibition of Screwball Comedy/Stories Going Steady" that both reference his words and have lives of their own. "January or February" is represented by a wall-hung vanity with jars labeled, for example, "Self-Esteem Scrub," "Approval Moisturizer with SPF 250" and "Right as Rain Wash." The album cover of "Frank Sinatra Sings for Only the Lonely" occupying a wheelchair on a striped rug illustrates "Eventually." Most powerfully, "Sports" is interpreted by a rack of equipment like footballs and basketballs, golf and baseball sets, all marked on the back of their price tags with "Father Not Included," all made the more poignant because they are children's versions.

Also exhibiting are Maggie Haas, whose well-sited "Bower" brings to mind Ann Hamilton's "offerings," installed at the Mattress Factory as a part of the 1991 Carnegie International; Brian Holderman, whose wall of digital prints, "DARK CLOUD," projects a cartoon/skateboard aesthetic; and Gavin Benjamin, whose apparently self-referential "Nancy Boys" is flush with a variety of symbols for those interested enough to parse them.

The exhibition continues through July 31, an overlap day with the next "Gestures," which opens the previous night in the Monterey Annex. They're like the best summer reading -- a diversion from the year's norm but one that offers new ways of thinking about the world.

At 500 Sampsonia Way, North Side; parking lot is at 505 Jacksonia. Hours are 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesdays through Fridays, 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. Saturdays and 1 to 5 p.m. Sundays. Admission is $8, $5 seniors/students, children under 6 free, half off Thursday. For information, call 412-231-3169, or to review all of the "Gestures" shows, visit www.mattress.org.