However, Eliasson is not a showman in the true sense; he doesn't need to be. Chalk it up to Nordic steeliness—he was born in Iceland and raised in Denmark—but his work is less of a spectacle than an immersion; it's a crowd-pleaser tempered by pensiveness.

At Bonakdar, he's built a 360-degree panoramic room around a light source that hovers above a disc of water like the nerve center of a science fiction mothership. Movement around the water creates ripples that are then projected as oscillating waves of light across the room's curving wall. Elsewhere in the gallery, Eliasson has installed a hanging sphere of triangular mirrors set in a spiraling framework. Illuminated and mirrored from the inside, it casts spectacular shards of light that spill over its sides and out into the space beyond. The piece might evoke Buckminster Fuller's geodesic domes, as the artist suggests, but it's also hard to resist comparing it to a disco ball. Both are shiny round objects. And both scatter themselves to inflect the shared experience of those in their reach.

Indeed, Eliasson places the viewer in an otherworldly context in which the material and immaterial are as mutable and interdependent as the relationship between the viewer and the context itself. In other words, he demands that you think about perception, what is perceptible and your role in perceiving it. In the panoramic room at Bonakdar, for example, the undulating ribbons of light respond to the actions of those who—both individually and collectively—are simultaneously observing and manipulating them. In a similar way, the mirrored ball shapes an encounter that's both shared and personal; you can experience the object itself, the environment it creates or—by poking your head through an opening in its bottom—the infinite space within it.

Eliasson blurs the distinction between subject and object, and viewer and surroundings. Central to his work is decentralization; in this way, it can be considered anti-modernist. But in order to decentralize, Eliasson first creates a center. For example, another work on display at Bonakdar is a wall-mounted neon compass rose that's projected, through a pin-hole, onto a lens. Seen together, the arrows form a star shape that focuses your attention. But, in flashing sequences, they point in every which way.

An overgrown U.S. Capitol building rising from a tropical rainforest. An Epcot Center that's reverted to swampland. Mount Rushmore nearly submerged in water. These are among Alexis Rockman's images of a future beset by global warming, currently on view at Leo Koenig. Rockman, who has long been known for paintings that fuse natural history, fantasy and cultural critique, has again turned his attention to the disasters that await. As with his previous works—a series addressing biotechnology, for example—these latest canvases skillfully point to the impossibility of objective observation. They're almost diagrammatic in their precision—you know what Rockman is trying to say—though they're clearly a product of his imagination. But, in light of the facts on the ground, they already feel all too real.