ART REVIEWS : Linda Roush Sculpts Space With Light : ‘Light Joining’ alters the gallery in ways intended to heighten awareness of the way space is carved out of light. The piece calls on the viewer to complete it.

Linda Roush’s “Light Joining” is the fourth presentation in the Santa Monica Museum’s Artist Projects Series, a program of installations tailored specifically for this museum (which was designed by Frank Gehry). Thus far the most austere and demanding piece in the series, “Light Joining” is also richly rewarding if you allow it to work its magic.

Roush explains herself as being “interested in the way ambient light characterizes space”; that idea is manifested here in discrete alterations of the main gallery that are intended to heighten one’s awareness of the way space is carved out of light. Roush is an extremely subtle artist--she basically just tweaks the room, turning up the volume of existing light here, toying with reflected colors there--and on entering the gallery viewers are apt to think they’re in an empty space. As with work by James Turrell and Robert Irwin--artists who clearly influenced Roush--it takes a minute for the piece to kick in. Among the prompters Roush provides are: a thin vertical blue neon tube tucked into a corner; two columns of white gauze that stretch from floor to ceiling and seem to radiate light; and a small glass globe (it looks like an alchemist’s charm) suspended from the ceiling.

“Light Joining” is as idealistic as it is understated in that Roush relies on the viewer to “complete” the piece, and apparently has faith that the viewer can and will do his part. This participatory approach to art is rooted in the Minimalist belief that art is something that happens to real people in real time and space. The “real thing” Roush is attempting to bring about is an awareness of the phenomenon of seeing--which in turn opens the Pandora’s box of how meaning is made.

Also on view is Ellen T. Birrell’s “T(h)ree Rings: Art by Installment,” the third in the Artist Projects Series. A sequential piece that unfolds in three installments, “T(h)ree Rings” is on view in its second incarnation through Thursday, when the third and final installment will be unveiled. The meaning of the piece is cumulative--in other words, one can’t grasp the full content of this work without seeing all three episodes.

Episode two is a small room built out of raw lumber and decorated with dozens of small mechanical reproductions in identical black frames. One deduces from an artist’s statement on display that every part of the piece, from the rubber stamps on the lumber to the pictures on the wall, is loaded with significance and complex meaning--perhaps too much meaning. Birrell has devised an alphabet of signs and symbols so convoluted and deeply personal that only her closest friends will be able to translate this piece into coherence. Birrell describes her work as being about “mining the quality of resemblance as emblematic in visual art of a conflation of content and form.” This piece is difficult enough to begin with; “explaining” it with unnecessarily esoteric art verbiage of this sort functions like a “keep out” sign.

The Santa Monica Museum, 2437 Main St., (213-399-0433), “Light Joining” runs through Jan 13, “T(h)ree Rings” runs to Feb 3. Open Wednesday through Sunday. Closed Monday and Tuesday.

Hine Survey: Lewis Hine is best known for his photographs of the immigrants who passed through Ellis Island during the first decade of this century. A survey of Hine’s work at G. Ray Hawkins Gallery in Santa Monica reveals that Hine photographed many other things over the course of his long career, and that his belief in the camera as a tool for social reform colored every picture he took.

Born in Oshkosh, Wis., in 1873, Hine began photographing the Ellis Islanders in 1904 as a way of combating the prejudice many Americans were expressing towards the newly arrived immigrants. The one shot from his Ellis Island series included here, “So This Is America, Jewish Woman, Ellis Island,” isn’t one of his best; Hine occasionally gets a bit high minded, and the nobility of the woman depicted is underscored to the point of piousness. Nonetheless, it was with this work that he introduced the stylistic approach that remained unchanged throughout his career. Hine was essentially a classicist and his pictures tend to be lyrically composed and rather formal--you get the sense he always maintained a respectful distance from his subjects.

Employed from 1908 through 1917 as staff photographer for the National Child Labor Committee, Hine next turned out a wrenching series on children working in sweatshops and factories. These pictures were instrumental in reforming child labor laws, and today they serve to remind us of a tragic aspect of the Industrial Revolution. Hine’s images of this period (six are here) depict children whose grave, haggard faces show them to have been robbed of childhood by poverty and an indifferent government.

Following World War I, Hine devoted himself to the idea of positive documentation and immersed himself in a series glorifying the human element in industry. Three works from this period are here, including “Powerhouse Mechanic,” one of Hine’s most widely reproduced images. Hine’s interest in the life of the working man then led to a commission to document the building of the Empire State Building in 1930-31. Hine was relentless in his efforts to do this job right--he even had himself swung out in a cement bucket to snap some pictures--and his images from this period (six are here) are stunning. We see daredevil riveters perched on a narrow beam, as blase as birds; far below them is the city of New York shrouded in mist.

The last decade of Hine’s life coincided with the Depression and Hine’s work of that period fell into a bit of a funk as well. He was employed as a documentary photographer by agencies with little creative vision, and Walker Evans, Margaret Bourke-White and Dorthea Lange took over the lead in socially conscious documentary photography. Hine’s final act wasn’t so great, but as this exhibition shows, his career as a whole was a smash.

Also on view is a fantastic group show drawn from the gallery holdings. Featuring new and vintage works by more than 50 photographers, this survey is like a crash course in the history of photography in the 20th Century. With work dating from 1912 through the present, the show includes choice images by everybody from Irving Penn and Ansel Adams to Robert Mapplethorpe and Andres Serrano. G. Ray Hawkins Gallery: 910 Colorado Ave., Santa Monica (213-394-5558), through Saturday. Closed Sunday and Monday.