"Donna Dennis - Coney Night Maze" Exhibition in Purchase - NYTimes.com Peter Mauss/Esto Photographics The turnstile and gates along the edges of "Coney Night Maze," built at a slightly reduced scale, present a contradiction. In 1996, during an outing to Coney Island, Donna Dennis found herself unexpectedly captivated by the Cyclone roller coaster. But it wasn't the thrill of the ride or the enthusiasm of the crowds that drew her; it was the strange landscape beneath. Ms. Dennis, an internationally exhibited artist known for her architectural installations, spent much of the next 13 years building "Coney Night Maze," a monumental, labyrinthine structure inspired by the underside of the 86-year-old wooden landmark. Her piece now occupies a darkened gallery at the Neuberger Museum of Art, where the ghostly rattle of the ride can be heard in the distance. In her work, a section of rickety track swoops upward over 12 feet high; another plunges down. Yet the heart of it is the tangle below, a convoluted environment of I-beams, dangling electrical cords and bits of barbed wire lit by rows of bare light bulbs, most of them burned out. Red and green ramps meander amid wood-planked walls. On the left is a rundown ticket booth, and deeper inside, another booth painted the same shade of blue. All this is visible behind - and sometimes obscured by - seemingly endless layers of white chain-link fencing. "Coney Night Maze," which is being exhibited for the first time, is a place of mystery and contradiction. The mazelike ramps and fences seem to direct passage but instead lead nowhere. Signs are posted throughout, but all are blank. "They're supposed to tell you what to do but they don't say anything," Ms. Dennis said. So what do you do with that? Like her previous works, "Coney Night Maze" is built at a slightly reduced scale. A red turnstile, for instance, stands less than five feet tall - too small for a person to fit into even if it did turn, which it doesn't. The turnstile and several gates along the edges of the piece suggest another contradiction. "They invite you to enter," Ms. Dennis said, "but you can't get in." Ms. Dennis hopes these incongruities will compel visitors, who can explore the perimeter and peer in. "I want people to walk around and notice details," she said. I want them to wonder about the narratives inside. Why are lights on in the booths, as well as behind a window curiously built into the 27-foot-long rock wall that serves as the installation's backdrop? "Maybe someone's in there," Ms. Dennis offered. Maybe they're asleep. And what about the sound? The haunting loop was created by the composer Dan Moses Schreier: several seconds of a faint, whooshing clatter, then silence. "It's almost like the roller coaster is dreaming of itself," Ms. Dennis said. While the Cyclone conjures images of daytime pleasures, "Coney Night Maze" presents a nocturnal experience. "You're coming into a dark space so your eyes have to adjust," said Helaine Posner, the Neuberger's senior curator of contemporary art. Then as you walk around the piece, various components reveal themselves. This is a work that unfolds over time. Now a professor of art at Purchase College, Ms. Dennis, 70, gained recognition in the 1970s for her gallery installations of scaled-down tourist cabins and subway stations. "I've always been drawn to vernacular architecture," she said, which she defined as architecture "that seems to have just kind of happened." Ms. Dennis's attraction to improvisation infuses "Coney Night Maze," her largest work to date. As with all her projects, it was prompted by an emotional response, in this case her excitement that day on Coney Island, where she took numerous photographs. Before long, her imagination had turned the teeming scene she had witnessed into a desolate one. "I notice what I notice," she said, "then I make a piece to try to figure out why." To a degree, her methods are systematic, involving observation, documentation and the assembly of a model before construction. But her process is also intuitive, relying on ongoing reflections in her journals. "I look for things that will take me on a journey of discovery," she said. I love wondering what I'm going to find. Some of what she found while creating "Coney Night Maze" was shaped by the events of Sept. 11, 2001, which she saw from the TriBeCa loft where she has lived and worked for four decades. Afterward, the piece took on more sinister connotations. "I began to see the rock wall as a menacing presence looming over the fragile structure of the roller coaster," she said. Her fences, too, felt more threatening. "I saw pictures of all those layered fences at Guantánamo," she said, "and there were fences in my neighborhood, too. I realized that the same thing had come about at the Cyclone: the fences were there to control people, to keep them from going where they weren't supposed to go. There is, however, one segment of fencing at the front of the installation that is folded back on itself to leave an opening. The decision to leave that gap assumed growing significance for Ms. Dennis as the work developed. "I started wondering, how would you actually reach the track?" she said. The signs are no help, and if you got caught in the maze, you'd never get there. You'd get frustrated, you'd get lost, you might even get scared. But then you'd think, "Oh, I can just peel back the fence and go through." You'd break the rules. You wouldn't give up. You'd find your own way. "Donna Dennis: Coney Night Maze" is on view through Oct. 13 in the South Gallery at the Neuberger Museum of Art, 735 Anderson Hill Road, Purchase. For more information and a schedule of related programming: neuberger.org or (914) 251-6100.