A personal reverie overheard through a window and a colorful flotilla of fanciful creatures are helping to soothe the withdrawal symptoms of contemporary art fans at Carnegie Museum of Art since the Carnegie International's closing.

"Opera for a Small Room" by Canadian artists Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller is a dark meditation on memory, remorse, loneliness and isolation. But it's also an upbeat probe into the triumph of individualism, however idiosyncratic its shape and direction.

Many will remember Cardiff's offbeat 1999 Carnegie International piece "In Real Time," a site-specific work designed for the Carnegie Library adjacent the museum. Visitors with headphones and mini digital camcorders were guided through the stacks and open rooms of the library by vocal instructions that had a psychological edge.

Here, too, the piece enters the visitor's head, worming through the barrier between outer and inner worlds as good theater does. While it plumbs the subconscious to spark emotional response, it also engages the analytical side of the mind through its narrative and the implications thereof.

That story, though fictional, was inspired by a trove of opera records the artists discovered in a small-town second-hand store in British Columbia. Each was marked with the name R. Dennehy. The artists, unable to learn more about the aficionado, fabricated a portrait driven by questions about what forms us, what we choose to surround ourselves with, and what haunts us; about how we create our own narratives, and how others interpret them.

The "room" of the title is more a small cabin, isolated in the black vastness of one of the large Heinz Galleries. The viewer approaches across an expanse of space and is stopped before an open window through which a drama of sorts unfolds. Within is a comfortably unkempt room, crowded with stacks of records, several record players, old radios and assorted memorabilia.

No actors are present, but a gravely male voice, fleeting shadows and sounds of record albums being looked through or a stuck needle being moved along suggest an unseen inhabitant.

The hypnotic, boozy voice and sounds at times emanate from the room, at others descend from the dark recesses of the gallery. They assist the internalization of the experience, as does the loss of one's physicality in the dark, cavernous gallery.

Music, including opera but also pop and country, at times cacophonous, works with changing light color and intensity to create the mood, success and uniqueness of this exceptional work. Cardiff considers sound to be "very sculptural. I've always felt a little synesthetic in terms of sound. I 'feel or see' it spatially in my mind's eye. When I imagine a piece I almost 'see' the sound moving around the space as a physical construction."

The 20-minute presentation may be enjoyed as a short play -- Cardiff has acknowledged inspiration from Samuel Beckett's "Krapp's Last Tape" -- or explored for multiple theatrical and literary references. The seemingly out-of-place chandelier that shakes at an appropriate moment calls to mind "Phantom of the Opera." The "Roadkill Crow Song" reminds of the artists' "The Murder Of Crows."

At the beginning of "Opera" there are sounds of an orchestra warming up. At its end, the room lights fade, there is applause, and then the gallery lights blaze on. Shakespeare wrote that "all the world's a stage." Here is art as metaphor for life. Or, is it the other way around?

"Forum 62: Maria Grazia Rosin" is more playful, at once an imagined space populated by fantastical denizens and an extravagant exploration of the chandelier form.

In the darkened gallery, 20 large glass works that resemble sea creatures or insects or microscopic animals are suspended from the ceiling. They're sufficiently familiar to suggest a plausible environment but sufficiently vague to encourage imaginative interpretation. Besides their inherent color, they shimmer with LED and fiber-optic lighting, each discordantly beautiful.

Completing the sensorially infused installation is "Glass Tongues," a futuristic sound component by electronic sound engineers Visnadi and Camomatic, and "Black Water Hole," a video projection of a watery world that could be earth's oceans, a black hole in space, or an environment not yet imagined.

I'd like for the gallery to be darker, but realize the security risks that entails. Still, the piece is joyful and the individual works are quite arresting.

Noted Italian glass artist Rosin initially trained as a painter in Venice but has been working in glass since 1992. A chandelier was exhibited in the Carnegie's 2007 "Viva Vetro! Glass Alive!"

If those aren't enough of a post-International fix, yesterday the five newly reinstalled contemporary galleries reopened representing CI08 curator Douglas Fogle's take on the permanent collection and including works from his exhibition as well as from earlier Internationals.

"Rosin" continues through June 28, "Opera" through July 19. Hours are 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday, until 8 p.m. Thursday, and noon to 5 p.m. Sunday. Admission is $15; seniors (65+), $12; students/children ages 3-18, $11; children under 3 and members, free; active military personnel 50 percent off. Information: 412-622-3131 or cmoa.org.