Wired for Thought : Observers interact with site-specific work.

In case you didn’t know it, the Brand Library’s Skylight Gallery is one of the more dramatic art spaces in the area.

Artists tend to know it, and they often savor the opportunity to incorporate the space in their work as well as their thinking. The latest example is Nobuyo Okuda’s current site-specific installation, aptly titled “Thinking.” Here, Okuda takes advantage of the long, open rectangular space with a deceptively simple idea: It’s done with wires.

A series of sturdy metal cables is strung strategically throughout the gallery, attached at various points on the walls and the floor. It gives the impression of a steely web or an elaborate security system using beams that cut across a room. But the aesthetic upshot is more poetic than that, as hinted at in a text on the wall, “The Wind.”

In a sense, the artist sparks our awareness of the real space in the gallery by dissecting it, and by making movement into it potentially hazardous. We can’t rely on typically casual art observation here since walking into the room means ducking under or tripping over wires. At the same time, we’re lured into the labyrinth by its very interactive nature. What makes the installation forbidding also makes it seductive.

Okuda’s sculptural material is less important than the ideas it triggers by dealing with the displacement of something as indefinable as space. First impression may suggest an ironic shock tactic, but there is no fiendish post-modernist ploy underway--just a refined and strangely elegant gesture that spurs thinking.

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CALAMITY CIRCUS: Though radically different in form, Jeanine Breaker’s work in the Brand’s Atrium Gallery also projects a delicate, self-conscious duality. Her art is held taut by the tension between sensuality and danger. Breaker shows a large collection of small but energetic matte paintings, like large postcards from the brink of some real or imagined abyss.

Destructive forces--raging fires, big surf, hurricanes--are also sources of allure, and tiny figures seem to relish the smell of peril. Tucked into corners of the compositions, they exhibit the courage of daredevils. Each image is accompanied by a descriptive phrase. The relevance of the phrases to the imagery varies.

Sometimes, there seems to be a reference to life in the volatile climate of Los Angeles. “Hold a candle before the devil” finds a girl jumping rope with a roaring blaze behind her, an image that could put a local in mind of such infernos as the 1993 Malibu fire.

Mostly though, specificity is not important. This is art about vulnerability in the face of forces we can’t tame, but also addresses our morbid curiosity in the face of danger.

BE THERE

Nobuyo Okuda and Jeanine Breaker, through Nov. 26 at the Brand Library. Gallery hours: 1-9 p.m., Tuesdays and Thursdays, 1-6 p.m., Wednesdays, 1-5 p.m., Fridays and Saturdays; (818) 548-2051.