"Mind Is Outer Space" - NYTimes.com 525 West 21st Street, Chelsea Through next Friday One of the summer's better gallery group shows is this presentation of some two dozen works in various mediums by 17 artists organized by Loring Randolph and Alice Conconi, director and associate director at Casey Kaplan. The title implies either that the human brain is the greatest, most infinite unknown or that all ideas drift about the universe until someone gives them form. Most works here vacillate between these readings, suggesting that they may belong to the same continuum. Aurélien Froment's exquisite video, "Second Gift," sets the stage with its exploration of the second of the 12 children's toys, called gifts, devised by Friedrich Froebel (1782-1852), the German educator who invented kindergarten. Gift 2, as it is known, features a frame from which hang a cube, a sphere and a cylinder, all made of wood. They look a bit like planets - a recurring motif here - but, as the video explains, are used by teachers to give young children a sense of the interconnectedness of geometric forms, materials and, by implication, everything in the world. The video is a useful lesson in looking at a show full of conundrums: mysterious presences, objects and juxtapositions as well as abrupt shifts in scale or implication. Navid Nuur's image of an intergalactic expanse, printed on a rug, hangs near a 10-minute slide-projection-like HD video by Josh Tonsfeldt that seems to follow one family's life, or universe, in extreme, haphazard close-up. Ricky Swallow's small "Saturn Cup," in patinated bronze that looks like clay, has two rings and sits next to a small sculpture in pink rubber by Louise Bourgeois. It is an ear, but looks alien, as do the ghostly figures in paintings by Markus Amm, Maaike Schoorel and Gino De Dominicis, or the implied supernatural beings in Hao Liang's series of enticing illustrations on silk of Chinese poetry. After pertinent contributions by Matt Hoyt, Mark Barrow, Haris Epaminonda and others, Mr. Froment rounds out the show with three photographs that suggest ancient sculpture but are details from "The Ideal Palace," an immense work of outsider sculpture/architecture that Ferdinand Cheval (1836-1924), a postman, built over several decades beginning in 1879, in Hauterives, France. An earlier version of this review misspelled an artist's surname and referred incorrectly to his work in the show. He is Josh Tonsfeldt, not Tonfeldt, and while the work resembles a slide projection, it is an HD video projection of still images, not a slide projection.