Lynn Davis at the Rubin Museum of Art

This unusual and evocative exhibition, "Illumination: Photographs by Lynn Davis," on view through July 17, combines eight major works of Buddhist sculpture of the 8th through the 17th centuries, from the museum's extensive holdings of Himalayan art, with a survey of 30 of Lynn Davis's large-scale black-and-white photos spanning 1983-2006. Organized by guest curators Charles Melcher and Jessica Brackman in tandem with the artist, the exhibition explores the dichotomies of permanence and transience, monumentality and the mundane, evident in the Buddhist works as well as in the photographs Davis has taken on her extensive world travels.

Handsomely installed in the galleries of the museum's circular, dome-ceilinged top floor, the show juxtaposes photos and sculptures that directly correspond with each other in terms of form and content. For instance, Davis's expansive image (33 by 88 inches) of a Buddhist island shrine with a restored towering pagoda, Crescent Moon Spring, Dunhuang, China (2001), is hung near Bon Ritual House for Funeral Ceremonies (Tibet, ca. 16th-17th century), an extraordinarily elaborate metal pagoda about 2 feet high. Elsewhere, a striking photo toned with gold and selenium, Buddha (1993), showing a detail of a monumental standing Buddha in Sukhothai, Thailand, that emphasizes the figure's serpentine limbs, communicates well with a gilt metalwork Arm Fragment from Tibet (15th century).

Much of the display, however, bears a more esoteric and elusive set of correspondences open to a variety of interpretations related to the artist's own Buddhist practice and spiritual beliefs. Among the most spectacular photos here are those from her ongoing series of icebergs taken on various journeys to the Arctic Circle. Iceberg #6, Disko Bay, Greenland (1988), for example, shows an enormous weather-hewn chunk of ice dynamically rising from the sea like a majestic horse that might have been cast by Boccioni. Fata Morgana I (2006), the most recent work on view and part of a new group of pictures using mirrored or doubled images, two of which are in the show, features a triangular piece of ice whose vast architectonic form seems to hover above the water. The melting icebergs are emblematic of hot-button issues of the environment and global warming. But hung as they are near Tibetan ritual objects, such as Skullcup (date unknown), a funereal vessel used to mix water and ashes, the photos appear in this context as quiet Buddhist meditations on the passage of time and on the material transmutability of all earthly things.

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