DURING SLEEP: intimations of death are everywhere in Chiharu Shiota's webbed sleep chamber. Related Links Rose Art Museum's official Web site

It’s hardly news that the most ubiquitous, profitable, and influential art form over the past half-century has been film. (The budget for a Hollywood blockbuster makes Madonna’s income or the money Christo raised for The Gates look like small potatoes.) Or that the influence of film and television now extends to every corner of life. We’re habituated to their launching political careers, but we’re only beginning to appreciate film’s impact on everything from religion to nutrition, from parenting to disease control.

A small but still strong motive for many of us involved in the visual arts, whether as practitioners or as observers, is to sidestep the prevailing culture, to pay attention to forms of expression that aren’t so pervasive or so baldly profit-driven. So I was a little alarmed when it hit me that fully half the works in "Dreaming Now," the new, renegade, sometimes wonderful, sometimes predictable show of installation art at Brandeis University’s Rose Art Museum, incorporate or refer to film. Is there no escape?

It further occurred to me that there’s an argument to be made for recognizing installation art — in some ways the most highly touted if not the most attended visual art form du jour — as being in direct argument with film. Just as abstraction in painting was born out of photography’s emergence as an artistic medium, so installation art offers to do what the inescapable moving picture can’t: to engage us beyond our eyes and our ears. Movies can’t make you walk through doors or smell wool or find your balance on uneven floors or have you assume a variety of unforeseeable postures, as to varying degrees almost every one of the seven "Dreaming Now" artists does. And when you can’t beat ’em, join ’em. William Kentridge’s contribution to the show is nothing other than a short movie.

"Dreaming Now" was organized around the principle of artists’ efforts at articulating and embodying their dreams, a legitimate theme but one that’s not as tight as you might think. If you accept the idea that all art emanates from the subconscious, dream inspiration turns out to be an ineluctable aspect of any creative endeavor. Newton doesn’t owe his epiphany to the apple, he owes it to the nap. Had "Dreaming Now" been called "Transportation Now," it would still cohere, still make sense. Travel, transport, and transformation are as much a recurrent motif as are dreams in the exhibit, and that should come as little wonder. Dreams deliver us to places beyond the wakeful world. That said, a number of these works take as their starting point sleep, and by far the most inspired contribution to "Dreaming Now" is the extraordinary During Sleep, by Japanese artist Chiharu Shiota.

I would not like to be Sandra Cinto or Maria Magdalena Compos-Pons, whose wall-sized ballpoint pen drawings and photographs, respectively, flank the central staircase where Shiota’s work gets quietly under way in the exhibit’s main gallery. If your eyes are like mine, they’ll be drawn immediately to the strands of black yarn that climb over the banisters, snake behind the stairs, and descend to the lower level. Downstairs, Shiota has spun a web of such density and magnitude and complexity, it takes over the walls and ceiling and floor of the entire room; you move as if by crawling. A space that is normally expansive and light now has the closed-in feel of a catacomb. The preponderance of black webbing not only induces darkness where there’s normally light, it mutes sounds where ordinarily you can hear the echo of shoes and conversation. In the ceiling-to-floor thickets of taut, pliable black yarn, the artist has added another element to the mix, 14 institutional beds, complete with pillows and headboards, white sheets and white blankets. Yet the beds lie so deeply within the webbing, not only can you not get near them, you have trouble seeing them. The quietude, the twilight, the barely perceptible beds that belong to a hospice or an asylum — suddenly you’ve stepped into a ward where nobody gets out. Intimations of death are everywhere.

The uncluttered elegance of Shiota’s creation — its clarity and simplicity, the fact that you could pretty much pick up all her materials at a Sears or a Home Depot — is worth paying attention to for the standard it sets. In an era that makes a fetish of technology and pyrotechnics and size, it’s easy to forget the drama of the well-conceived and the direct. A thousand e-mails don’t equal one hand-written letter; the flicker of a candle is far sexier than the dimmest light bulb. But Shiota’s power has nothing to do with anything old-fashioned. Instead, it’s about capitalizing on the familiar; we’re seduced by her vision in part because it takes us in with materials we’re used to. By transforming it, she makes us into participants. Then there’s the physical experience During Sleep insists on. You bend, you peer, you touch, you’re enveloped; above all, you feel you’re being breathed on. Finally, and maybe most important, During Sleep delivers a rare visual experience. (And how often can that be said of art that’s meant to be seen?) We’re allowed to apprehend the objects beyond the netting; at the same time, we’re prevented from apprehending them clearly. Shiota makes the proximate feel terribly far away.