On September 2, the Puget Sound Business Journal announced that Amazon.com – my former employer – had leased 180,000 square feet of space at the Bank of America Tower. When the world's largest Internet retailer moves into Seattle's tallest building, they will have some interesting company; a provocative sculptural installation by Seattle artist Dan Webb.

I would not have mentioned this recent bit of business news were it not for the fact that my initial encounter with the work, in Webb's south Seattle studio, brought back vivid memories of the three years I spent working for the building's newest tenant.

Webb has long been unique among local sculptors: no one is better able to deflate the popular and art historical trappings of the medium to evoke human conditions such as exhaustion and failure. Webb explores the empty regions where our urges dead-end; a haunting place where epistemological confusion meets psychological denial. At their best, his works also rise to the level of social critique.

Heads Up is a three-dimensional representation of a corporate management “org-chart,” one that adds the underlying, invisible Darwin vector into the equation.

Translucent, amber-hued male and female figures ascend a series of crisscrossing steel ladders. Sprouting from the shoulders of these worker-bees -- at the point where we would expect to see necks and heads -- are more ladders, upon which the faster and stronger ones climb.

Near the unfinished and unscaled pinnacle, the ladders intersect. At these points of collision, the upwardly mobile figures are stopped in their tracks while a smaller number continue on their journey into the emptiness.

Despite the harsher, more immediate suggestions of the work, Webb is not context to simply point out the existence of the Matrix to those who have swallowed the blue pill. He makes us acknowledge that this emerging structure, with its determined and self-denying builder-subjects, is the backbone of the organization and -- to an even greater degree -- society itself. As a dynamic model, it is as essential to our civilization as the similarly-sloped pillars are to the Bank of America Tower.

Across the lobby is Christine Bourdette's Bloom Cycle, a bronze-cast sculpture of an enormous, desiccated flower-cum-seed-pod that floats suspended in the air. While Webb's installation mimics the angled structures that surround the work, Bourdette's ethereal piece lies in stark contrast to them.

Upon closer inspection, her innocent-looking sculpture becomes no less subversive than Webb's. The artist, in the text of the wall plaque, claims to want to remind viewers of the “cycles of life” that exist in business, as in nature. But I can imagine this deceptively beautiful piece stirring the unconscious of my former coworkers, suggesting that some part of them lays dormant, awaiting germination.

It’s inevitable that as a creative field matures, repetition and cliché make their appearance.

Perhaps the panel that selected the Donald Fels and his team for the artwork inside the Seattle Public Library Ballard Branch was hoping for something bold and exciting, but the resulting work hops on the electronic art bandwagon without any interesting ideas of its own, the cyber equivalent of the thousands of Calder mobile knock-offs that now clutter the gift shops of the world. Consisting of eight panels that hang down from the library ceiling like space heaters, the piece takes information collected by an array of weather instruments on the roof and displays it as a sort of animated bar graph. Orange, electronic stripes rise and fall in a seemingly random pattern, with no more visual dazzle than the control panel of a digital tape deck, difficult to see from below and hardly worth the trouble. The piece treats the weather information – wind speed, temperature, rainfall, etc. – as mere fodder for the art, thus granting us neither information nor visual reward for all our neck craning. Perhaps the art’s saving grace is its invisibility, unnoticed overhead by all but a handful of the library’s patrons, who may be forgiven for assuming that the library has no public art at all.

No one can miss, on the other hand, the spectacular new electronic work by California artist and cyber-guru George Legrady, just installed at data central on the reference floor of the new downtown library. Clearly, this is a library that takes its own metaphors seriously. Library planners have long referred to the 5th floor as a “trading floor for information”. Already in place were the exchange clients (library patrons), traders with wireless communication devices (librarians), rows of computer terminals and a high-tech setting of stainless steel and glass. Legrady decided to complete the marketplace metaphor with a sort of information-age ticker tape, where the flow of books and ideas could be tracked like the stock prices of General Motors and Microsoft, but here meant for general edification and stimulation, rather than monetary enrichment.

Legrady, whose degree is in art and whose background is in photography, visualized the ticker tape as a series of charts, electronically animated and flowing across 6 jumbo sized plasma screens mounted above the long librarian’s desk. Each chart – there are currently four, displayed in sequence - represents a different way of analyzing checkout data from the previous hour’s activity at the Central Library, and all are visually striking. Most straightforward is a chart called “Statistics”, which simply displays running totals from various categories of materials - books, CDs, videos – like the accumulating numbers on election-night TV, except there are no winners of losers. Most interesting is the visualization called “Keyword map”, reminiscent in a vague way of the comic diagrams purporting to show the divisions of a man’s brain into unequally-sized sections devoted to food, sports, sex, work, relationships. Here the collective brain of the library’s patrons is made visible by the appearance of hundreds of keywords, color-coded and weighted by category and popularity. A web of energetic white lines zip across the screen, connecting the keywords to the classification of the books they came from – history or science, biography or art. The keywords I saw (they are on the inside title page of most books) included some of the usual suspects, at least for a Seattle audience: “Therapy”, “Yoga”, “Technology”, “Plants”, as well as some intriguing outliers: “Bomb”, “Control”, “Pressure”. In the other two display modes, the titles themselves float across the screen, either swimming from left to right like tropical fish, or floating down like snow, in neat Dewey Decimal rows. This last display is the most reminiscent of the arrival and departure screens at airports – another rather apt metaphor for watching library media as they depart for points unknown.

Legrady, a Hungarian expatriate who has been experimenting with digital art since the late 1980s, plans to monitor the installation – titled “Making Visible the Invisible” – over time, looking for evidence that the behavior of library patrons might be modified by the presence of the artwork itself. In fact, not everyone who encounters the Legrady piece will realize that it is, in fact, a work of art. Legrady’s ambition is to blend information and visualization in a poetic way, but one suspects that in the library piece the requirements of including so much legible content trumped over the artist’s natural desire to create compelling form. A look at Legrady’s other work, visible on his fascinating website www.georgelegrady.com, reveals that this is in fact the case. Left to his own devices, Legrady is as good as any artist I have seen at creating visually compelling abstractions using high-tech tools, such as his recent panels in a mass transit station in Santa Monica, which transforms traffic data into dazzling patterns of light and color, more visionary and compelling than the far more prolix animated charts in Seattle.

But does that matter? In this case, probably not. I’m not sure I would enjoy looking at Making Visible the Invisible on the walls of an office building. But in the new library, where there is no shortage of surrounding visual stimulation (and excellent public art), the 6 new panels will surely act as a popular focal point and a civic self-portrait, a fitting centerpiece for a building that is all about access, transparency, collectivity and connection.

At seventy-five years of age, painter Robert Jones continues to breathe life into a brand of Expressionism seldom executed these days with any degree of resolve or conviction. Jones, a student of Hans Hoffman, delivers his brush strokes with a confidence and vigor that can make the work of much younger, conceptually-based artists appear impotent and over-wrought.

With their dancing, sooty-black lines and vibrant pinks, greens, blues and yellows, Jones’ abstract paintings hover on the threshold of the figure. Our visual hunches are confirmed by his straight-forward titles, but not always in ways we expect. In Harbor, for example, black streaks reveal themselves as an arrangement of sloops, boats, and piers. But the painting’s bright-orange surface becomes both foreground and background, depicting sunlight reflected off the water and into our squinting eyes.

Distilled through this conflation of space, there is a sense of desire that stirs within his altered human landscapes. As with much of Jones’ work, this series of small and large oils explores familiar male obsessions. Unlike Picasso or DeKooning, however, he renders his impulses with delight and -- remarkably -- something approaching innocence.

Garden Girls III is as randy as it is discreet. Pink squares of color are dispersed upon a scattered green surface, loosely bound by curvaceous black lines. Once we discern the movement of its fluid female forms, we experience the disruptive moment when a man recognizes his own physical urges.

The other paintings follow in this vein. In Picnic, we observe the outlines of nude figures superimposed upon a red, patterned tablecloth, suggesting the possibilities of an intimate encounter. The vertical black stripes of Bathers become the legs of two persons wading into the tide. We are left contemplating what might take place beyond our limited lines of site. Even in the smaller Secret Garden the black, rounded form has the alluring quality of a human figure waiting in the shaded greenness.

Robert Jones’ greatness as a painter lies in his ability to capture the unique sensation of sexual arousal and the lingering promise of its fulfillment.

Just days away from its closing, I made one last visit to the Seattle Art Museum to see Isamu Noguchi -- Sculptural Design. The show, organized by the Vitra Design Museum in Weil an Rhein, seems as much a showcase for exhibition designer Robert Wilson as it does Noguchi himself.

As its title suggests, the show focuses upon the functional objects Noguchi designed during the 40s and 50s. Documentation or reproduction of his monumental sculptural works is omitted, appearing only occasionally as scenic backdrops.

Wilson’s challenge was to create an exhibition that provided a context for the work without diminishing its timeless vibrancy and spirit. He had to resist the urge to transform the museum into a furniture showroom just as he had to refrain from treating the lamps, tables, cups and saucers inappropriately as significant pieces of art.

Noguchi, born in Los Angeles in 1904 to an American mother and Japanese father, stands amidst the 20th Century’s great artistic cross-currents; in his work, the past meets the present where East meets West. His art combines the traditional rusticity and asceticism of Japanese design with the masculine, Modernist European sculptural gesture of Brancusi, the artist under whom he apprenticed as a young man in Paris during the 20s.

We experience this most completely in the first of Wilson’s rooms, a black cave that features dimly-illuminated stagecraft Noguchi designed for the Martha Graham Dance Company. His primitivist renditions of Orpheus’ Lyre, Jocasta’s Bed, and the Minotaur’s Mask are perfect centerpieces for Graham’s choreography, which explored the human experience through the tortured re-enactment of ancient Greek myth and legend.

Wilson has installed video screens that play grainy, decades-old black-and-white clips of the Graham Company performing these dances so that we may imagine the ancient relics come to life. They are discreetly projected upwards so as not to distract our observations of the works themselves.

As we leave this dark womb of human history, we find ourselves in a brightly-lit landscape of benches and Akari lamps, complete bark, hay-bales and a noisy audio track of a busy eating establishment. Here we notice the recurrence of Noguchi’s signature shapes – the guitar pick, the boomerang, the pregnant seed-pod -- and are forced to acknowledge their intrinsic beauty.

The following gallery, with its meandering path of slabs set in a floor of crushed gravel, is devoted to smaller stone sculptural works as well as models of larger pieces. In the hazy light, our fascination with his shapes gives way to an appreciation of his carefully rendered surfaces and textures.

For the fourth and final room, Wilson creates a conventional museum space where he attempts to reveal relationships between Noguchi’s sculpture and his commercial design work. Bronze busts of R. Buckminster Fuller and Japanese dancer Michio Ito are juxtaposed with electronic devices designed for the Zenith Radio Company. Chairs and other pieces of furniture used as sets by Martha Graham for Herodiade and Appalachian Spring are placed beside coffee tables that were manufactured by Knoll and Herman Miller.

This is the least successful part of the installation. Wilson actually does a much better job integrating sculpture and design in the second gallery and third galleries, which are laid out much like gardens. In the second, an image of grass and stone from Noguchi’s Play Mountain at the Moere Numa Park in Sapporo can be seen behind the stacked bales of hay while the lanterns lines the bark-strewn path like ancient, bonsaied pines.

In the third gallery, a dynamic highlight is the small, painted-wood model of the Horace E. Dodge and Son Memorial Fountain. This relatively inconsequential-looking piece is placed on a substantial pedestal in front of a translucent screen. Behind this illuminated grayness, we can barely make out an obscured projection of the actual fountain going at full force. It is only the complementary, gushing audio track that makes us aware of its presence.

An art critic friend of mine thought that Wilson’s treatment of his subject was too flamboyant and heavy-handed. While I can see her point, I am not sure how else one might treat such an artist in the context of a traveling, temporary museum exhibition.

O course if you really want to experience Noguchi, head over to Volunteer Park and spend some time with his magnificent Black Sun, which overlooks downtown Seattle.