An exhibition with wide and deep roots opens this weekend at Carnegie Museum of Art and with it the opportunity to participate in one of the most stimulating conversations likely to be held in Pittsburgh this year.

The solo exhibition, in the Forum Gallery, comprises four ceiling-high paintings, conceived as gates or portals to a larger ongoing work, by Carnegie Mellon University professor Lowry Burgess. Whether they are symbolic or more is dependent upon your mystical receptivity, because Burgess' expression straddles rational and intuitive spheres, scientific and belief sectors, experiential and imagined space, and normative and conceptual time.

Burgess will discuss his work of four decades during a free public dialogue with Douglas Fogle beginning at 6 p.m. Friday in the Museum of Art Theater. Fogle is museum curator of contemporary art and curator of the 2008 Carnegie International, which opens May 3.

The conversation promises to be dynamic. Burgess is an intellectual with both feet on the ground, a humanist who agonizes over man's follies while celebrating potential. He makes complexity accessible because he basks in it, and he shares.

"There is no greater pleasure than the mind watching itself work," he says, and by the time he's finished explaining, you're a true believer.

And he'd like nothing better than that visitors to his exhibition "get some deep joyful pleasure in contemplation of something that I hope they see and feel."

Burgess' background is expansive and includes forays into science, global policy-making and education (he was instrumental in the open schools movement and in founding the first alternative high school in the United States). He has served as dean of Carnegie Mellon University's College of Fine Arts and is co-founder of and distinguished fellow of the school's Studio for Creative Inquiry, a multidisciplinary art project incubator, as well as fellow of the Center for the Arts and Society.

His 1989 "Boundless Cubic Lunar Aperture" was the first official artwork taken into outer space by NASA, and he is currently investigating the establishment of an institute for space arts on the West Coast.

Burgess is also a poet, but of essences rather than of words.

While in Greece over the summer, he completed a three-decade art project, "Seeds of the Infinite Absolute," the sixth of eight major aspects of his magnum opus "Quiet Axis." The Carnegie paintings offer entry to that work.

Attempts to summarize Burgess are futile, but to give a hint at what his works encompass, the sixth aspect includes two "seeds"-- the shells of which were made of 12 metals distilled at the foot of Mount Whitney -- that were filled with a combination of elements gathered from around the world. These included "sap from 44 trees, water from 36 great rivers, essence from 52 flowers, blood from 33 university faculty and students, vermilion, pulverized holograms of peaches and telepathic images of 60 pairs of people's desired future lives," distilled over 25 years in various conditions, including zero gravity during a parabolic flight above Los Angeles.

For completion, Burgess placed one of the seeds atop an 8,000-foot peak in the Taygetos mountains in Greece and released the other into the 20,000 foot Calypso Deep, where the African tectonic plate slips under the European Plate.

Another aspect, the "Inclined Galactic Light Pond," was the result of a "waking vision" he had in 1968 in Cambridge, realized six years later in Bamiyan, Afghanistan, within view of the ancient Bamiyan Buddhas that were destroyed by the Taliban in 2001.

In dismayed response, Burgess wrote the "Toronto Manifesto," calling for the protection of world-class cultural properties, and delivered it at the 2001 Planetary Vision Festival in Toronto. He continues to hold discussions with UNESCO and the World Bank about the financial incentives of the Manifesto, working for adoption by a global enforcement body.

"There's a tradition in Western painting of art as miracle," Burgess muses, "as a cathartic or for healing," citing examples as wide-ranging as Bosch, Kandinsky and Swedish artist Hilma af Klint.

Whether compared to self-generated psychedilia, European roadside shrines, iconographic presences or rabbit holes that lead to Wonderland, the mind-tweaking journey through Burgess' heady mixture of alchemy, philosophy and poetry will be its own reward.

"Forum 61: Lowry Burgess" continues through March 23. Hours are 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday and noon to 5 p.m. Sunday. Hours will be expanded for November and December holidays. Admission is $10, $7 seniors, $6 students/children; members free, through Nov 20. For information: 412-622-3131 or cmoa.org.

Clarification

Adrienne Heinrich, co-chair of the 2007 Associated Artists of Pittsburgh Annual, called Monday to correct a budget reference in my Sunday exhibition story. The AAP has to date raised $66,500 toward the cost of the show, as reported, and $26,500 of that is applied to printing the catalog for the concurrent "Popular Salon" show.

The remaining $40,000 was not, as implied, paid to the museum, but used for the upfront, nonvenue related costs of putting on such a substantial show, including the juror's fee, travel and accommodation expenses; show announcements and catalog; artwork photography; juror's and opening receptions; the 16 juror's awards and ongoing gallery attendants.

"[The Carnegie] doesn't request that money," Heinrich says. "They request essentially that we produce the show up to that point," when the artworks are delivered to the museum. The Carnegie declined to comment on exhibition-related museum expenses.