This is the last week to catch a genuinely spectacular show at the Nelson Gallery--Out in Space: Sculptures, Drawings, Paintings by Dave Lane. The gallery is crowded with Lane's work, dense as a patch of rainforest. Although rather than slashing your way through knotted vines and screeching gibbons, you find yourself amidst flora that's been salvaged from industrial scrapheaps, and the soundtrack (emitted from a speaker tucked discreetly in a corner) is one of soothing evening sounds. It feels like dusk: night, with all its numinous spangles, is about to be born.

The space is dominated by large sculptures that loom all the way up to the ceiling (gradually, you realize that there's no doorway large enough for these titans to enter; they had to be disassembled and then reassembled into being). Pieced together from bits of farm equipment and other abandoned machinery, they show off their insides--scaffolds for shoring up metaphysics. Many have elements that resemble those antiquated models of the solar system, where you can spin the planets in their paths around the sun by turning a crank--running the orbits as though driving a bicycle. Some of them exude antiquated lightbulbs that distend from the frames like illuminating baubles of sap. Many of the surfaces are rusted, and oxidation becomes the patina--or rather the gilt--of grandeur.

In his wind-up universe Lane makes totems of gears. A train has a distorted smokestack that doubles as the funnel of a black hole. A fleet of heavy tricycles is set to run some meteoric errand.

Some of the pieces serve as crypto-portraits. Grandpa Mosley has a "head" formed of telescoping concentric rings, and on a shelf between his fore-axles, he's nestling a smaller, wheeled figure. Grandma Planet has a "charm bracelet" dangling on heavy chains beneath her planetoid-cerebellum, one of the charms being a black volcano that's been pulled from the earth like a rotten tooth.

The weird dislocations of scale (jumping from volcano to tooth) are heightened by the presence, on a side wall, of little dioramas that recall glassed-in Cornell boxes. Smaller in size than lunchboxes, each features a theatrical scene, populated by tiny painted figurines. A naked female figure--Lane identifies her as an alter ego, whose task "is to wander around inside my brain, and interview these folks who are the metaphorical manifestations of different aspects of personality, thought, or some form of consciousness"--appears in several, enacting conversations that mix scientific inquiry with colloquial banter.

The dialogues are written out underneath the boxes; in one scenario, she passes over a grave (we can see the coffin wedged between strata in a cross-section of earth) and talks to a ghost who is confined within a fifteen-foot radius of his corpse. When she suggests he could travel farther if the bones were dug up, the ghost muses over the repercussions that might occur if the "vector properties of the object collection changes." In another box, two men walk past telephone poles, and talk about the collapse and the expansion of the universe.

The conversations carry the flotsam of jargon that often accompanies the speech of the autodidact. The curator of the show, Renny Pritikin, invokes William Blake in talking about Lane's work--the work of both artists appears fundamentally "self-taught," in the best sense. Each artist seems caught up in his own universe--a universe so detailed, so convincing in all its particulars, there's no need for the one handed down as the official astronomy.

The exhibit put me in mind of Walter Benjamin's essay "On the Mimetic Faculty." In his consideration of the power of mimesis--the art of imitation--he declares that man has the "highest capacity for producing similarities." This capacity is not constrained to the imitation of other people; Benjamin describes how a child can play "at being not only a shopkeeper or teacher but also a windmill, and a train." He goes on to write: "the sphere of life that formerly seemed to be governed by the law of similarity was comprehensive; it ruled both microcosm and macrocosm."

And indeed, why stop at microcosmic windmills and trains? Why not play at being a solar system, a galaxy? Benjamin traces the decay of the mimetic faculty to the degraded state of astrology, which is one of the "minimal residues of the magical correspondences and analogies that were familiar to ancient peoples."

Dave Lane's work revives an echo, a link to the cosmology of those "ancient peoples," tied to Benjamin's imagination by a thread of envy. Lane possesses that mimetic faculty, in a non-degraded state--establishing, at least in the bounds of the gallery, a law of similarity that once again rules "both microcosm and macrocosm," shifting on the gyres of gear ratios, inscribing the mechanical advantage between the human and the celestial in interlocking spans of rust-bitten teeth.

Out in Space will be on view at the Nelson Gallery through March 8th.