E-Mail This Article to a Friend Going west Puppets in Lincoln, painting in Waltham BY RANDI HOPKINS

Walk up to the DeCordova Museum’s expansive glass-fronted entrance and a funny sight will catch your eye: a white-faced ringmaster-like figure in a black top hat up there on a swing, his mouth a wide red "O," and his hypnotic blue eye looking down with either horror at the height or some weird glee. Is he about to jump? Fall?

As it turns out, this carved carnival character is just one half of Pat Keck’s brand-new site-specific sculpture Over and Out — when the light is right (or at night), you can see his double swinging inside the museum. Keck made Over and Out for her one-person exhibition "Puppets, Ghosts and Zombies: The Sculpture of Pat Keck," which opens at the DeCordova next Saturday. And this playful, ominous sculpture is an ideal two-headed circus barker outside the exhibition, drawing viewers in and foreshadowing some of her favorite themes, her humor, and her close working relationship with the pleasure we find in terror.

The Andover-based Keck has been making figurative sculpture for more than 25 years, exploring a fascination with puppets, ventriloquist’s dummies, and other humanoid objects, and this show includes more than 50 of her works, many of them interactive and mechanical. "I like things that people project onto," she explains as we look at some of the folks she’s made over the years. They’re now piled about in boxes in the bowels of the DeCordova, awaiting installation like actors in a green room — and in contrast to the artist herself, who’s decidedly non-flamboyant in jeans and T-shirt, they’re theatrically costumed, as if on their way to do a vaudeville act, star in a monster movie, or perhaps back up David Byrne in an early Talking Heads music video. They’re diverse in dress and scale, yet many of these wooden figures share a strange, fixed stare, reminding us that Keck is not trying to particularize human emotions in each figure but rather is giving us a gaggle of highly evocative blank slates to interact with.

Throughout her career, Keck’s painted wooden sculptures have departed from traditional notions of fine art, slipping over the border into craft or folk art, but she has stayed with her vision. An elaborate recent sculpture titled The Messengers is made up of four mop-headed lads on a colorful stage set; when you put a quarter into a coin slot, lights flicker and written messages emanate from the work, along the lines of the mechanical fortune tellers found at arcades. "I’ve always liked inanimate objects better than sculpture," says Keck. "I liked dolls and puppets and dummies because they were more like little beings, whereas regular sculpture, you never thought it was going to get up and walk around or anything." Going through "Puppets, Ghosts, and Zombies," you may fear that that’s exactly what’s about to happen.

Painting is alive and very well, thank you, at the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University this fall, and in curator Raphaela Platow’s first major Brandeis exhibition, "Painting4," which opens next Thursday, it walks right off the walls, almost as if endowed with its own little wooden legs. The "4" in the title refers to the "fourth power," indicating that participating artists Ingrid Calame, Katharina Grosse, Michael Lin, and Jimmy O’Neal have expanded painting beyond two-dimensionality into the realms of space and time. There’s even work you can lounge around on. Platow has also curated a fresh exhibition of works on paper called "bad touch," a traveling show that adds local artists at each venue; it will feature more than 90 artists in this incarnation.

"Puppets, Ghosts, and Zombies: The Sculpture of Pat Keck" is at the DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park, 51 Sandy Pond Road in Lincoln, from September 13 through January 18, with a free opening reception September 19 from 6 to 8 p.m.; call (781) 259-8355. "Painting4" and "bad touch" are at the Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University in Waltham, from September 11 through December 7; call (781) 736-3434.