What do the following Pittsburghers have in common?: A vintage clothing store owner, a robotics professor, members of an experimental band, an artist steeped in fine art tradition and an alternative art space developer.

The answer is that they're all participating in "illustrations of catastrophe and remote times," the 10th installment of the popular, eclectic "Gestures" exhibition series at the Mattress Factory.

"Gestures" was begun by the North Side museum in 2001 as a supplement to an exhibition schedule that favors long-term artist residencies, during which room-sized, site-specific installations are created.

As implied by its title, "Gestures" artworks are to be driven by spontaneity, conceived and carried out in far shorter time periods than those of anchor shows.

The experimental bar is set high, emphasizing process and edge-pushing. From the start, participants were drawn from a broad creative community rather than limited to, though including, practicing artists with formal studio arts backgrounds.

Pulling off these shows requires a bit of fancy footwork, but Mattress Factory manages such projects well. "We have the flexibility as an organization. What might be difficult for another museum is a very easy thing for us," says Owen Smith, museum assistant to the curator.

Past exhibitors were selected by Mattress Factory curator Michael Olijnyk and critic/curator Graham Shearing. Guest curator Heather Pesanti, assistant curator of contemporary art at Carnegie Museum of Art, breaks that cycle, and also introduces the first exhibition theme, albeit while inviting loose interpretation.

The exhibition title comes from "The Domain of the Great Bear," an essay written by contemporary artworld heavyweights Robert Smithson and Mel Bochner in 1966 that was a conceptual artwork subversively passed off to Art Voices magazine as an article about New York's Hayden Planetarium.

Smithson, known most broadly for earthworks like "Spiral Jetty," died in 1973 but continues to be influential. He was the subject of a major touring retrospective which originated at The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, in 2004 and his "Floating Island" was implemented in New York in 2005. Bochner -- a Pittsburgher and CMU graduate who designed the sculpture garden Kraus Campo for the campus in 2005 -- remains an important voice in conceptual art.

Pesanti, who wrote a master's thesis on Smithson, gave the artists copies of the essay and asked them to "respond as much as they wanted -- ignore [it], take [it] literally, whatever you want."

She says she's been fixated on one of the pages by Smithson in particular, which provided the "over the top" exhibition announcement language and ends with the sentence "History no longer exists," conveying a sense of apocalyptic time. "It feels so important to me right now. I thought it would be interesting to see what this meant to other people."

The exhibition is, then, a double header, existing as a separate entity spawned by the essay, and also calling attention to an artist who died 35 years ago. "I think one of the most relevant things a curator can do," Pesanti says, "is to rewrite parts of overlooked history."

Asked whether this exhibition relates to the upcoming Carnegie International, Pesanti, who has been assisting International curator Douglas Fogle, draws a line between her role at each museum.

However there's been some undeniable serendipity. While discussing his potential participation in "Gestures," CMU robotics professor David Wettergreen said that his main scholarly interest was the possibility of finding life on Mars. The title of the 2008 International is "Life on Mars."

After that, there was no way Pesanti was going to allow him to decline.

The show starts outside with an appropriately foreboding piece by Brett Yasko, installed in perfect fit over the entry to the 1414 Monterey St. satellite space (the first outdoor piece in the Gestures series). Yasko, a much applauded graphic designer who's turned out some of the most inventive exhibition brochures and catalogues seen around town, created the public art work, "Market Square," for last summer's Three Rivers Arts Festival.

Inside the storefront entry is a wall installation both ritualistic and minimalist, by classically trained artist Fabrizio Gerbino. It comprises vertical rows of almost 200 impeccably crafted bars, patterned upon a found object, that were individually carved by the artist, covered in lead and buffed to a heartstopping stillness. Like a pond on an overcast day, they reflect nuance of color and light, the symbolic connotations of the material providing gravity.

A raised portion of floor to the right invites entry to the basement, where Christiane D. Leach of the band Soma Mestizo presents a sound-charged indictment of environmental degradation.

And you've just begun.

Turn a corner and walk into an installation by Black Moth Super Rainbow (first band), whose "mind blowing, interstellar psychedelic pop" earned them the 2007 Artist to Watch designation from Rolling Stone.

Sharing the gallery are Jennifer Howison, Ladyboy and Brillo Box owner Renee Ickes. Exit through a work by Jenny Lee, visit a video made during an opening-night performance by Ben Kinsley & Jon Rubin, check out another Yasko, and on to floor two.

First up are adjacent installations by brothers Danny and David Montano, the last names the only thing these two rooms have in common. Rebecca Einhorn's video installation and Matthew Barton & Jacob Ciocci's mixed-media piece find niches within Allan Wexler's permanent work, "Bed Sitting Rooms for an Artist in Residence."

The third floor houses photography by John Carson, head of Carnegie Mellon University's School of Art; an installation with mannequins by Michael Ferrucci, owner of Hey Betty vintage clothing store in Shadyside.; Jairan Sadeghi's drawings (her chador-garbed figures were exhibited during the 2006 Three Rivers Arts Festival); and a white space altered to a haunted, soiled condition by Lauri Mancuso, curator of the new arts venue Dorothy 6 in Braddock.

Wettergreen's otherworldly video montage, compiled from hours of images made by his project robots as they plodded through the extreme conditions of the Atacama Desert in Northern Chili, also plays here.

Quirky, inventive, radiating energy -- "Gestures" is an invigorating antidote to the doldrums, whether brought on by the state of the world or the state of the weather.

First Published: January 20, 2008, 10:00 a.m.