The title of the exhibition belies it's true nature, the work by Cornelia Parker currently on view at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts is not so much new as it is recent. In fact, the exhibition presents Mass (Colder, Darker Matter), an older work from 1997, contextualized by a new work created from nearly identical materials imbued with inversely significant social relevance. Yet again, perhaps the exhibition title is fitting. As with much of Parker's work, ambiguity is at the core of the experience.

Mass (Colder, Darker Matter) was created while the London-based artist was in residency at Artpace in San Antonio, Texas. It is composed from the charred remains of a white Baptist church, destroyed by lightening. Each of the blackened pieces are strung on fine wires and hung in a rectilinear constellation. As a whole the installation conveys a disconcerting combination of true annihilation and ethereal beauty. Common to Parker's work are explorations of destruction and recontextualized meanings, such as in the utilization of a church destroyed by an act of nature. Mass flows conceptually from an earlier work titled Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View (1991), in which Parker collaborated with the British Army to blow up a typical domestic storage shed and collect the exploded pieces for reassembly in an installation. Narrative themes arise from the artist's intellectual juxtaposition of ideas; previously explored in individual works, here the artist employs an exhibition to test dynamic tensions.

In the featured new work, Parker has retrieved the charred remains of a black Baptist church, destroyed by arson. Again the pieces are strung on wires and hung in a rectilinear arrangement. Unlike the older work, the shards are larger and convey more weight. The wires are less delicate and imply greater strength. Where the earlier work is assembled with minute pins, the newer work reveals the thick nails from the original structure. The two installations hang in the same large space, occupying diagonal corners in a room that feels crowded despite the airy compositions of the works. Their literal diagonal positions imply that they are diametrically opposed. Shared fate, I think to myself, also coincidentally the title from another of Parker's works in which a collection of items, a doll and necktie among them, are sliced in half by the same guillotine blade that beheaded Marie Antoinette. I circle the perimeters of each piece while my thoughts slide back and forth between them, mentally gathering their commonalities. Initially I am struck by the literal and metaphorical symmetry that has been created out of these products of 'complete' ruin. Each work hangs in a precise formation, effectively concealing the chaos that must have preceded their current state. Both buildings were churches destroyed by fire, albeit fires of intrinsically different origins. The tension surrounding issues of race and self-righteousness, as they might relate to the setting of the fires, hangs palpably in the room. Yet although the element of race may be more salient to one viewer, the religious overtones may ring more loudly to another. Possible variations of the artist's intent peel away in my mind like layers of an onion. The works, as they are side-by-side, offer several conceptual possibilities at once. As with her works individually, this presentation explores simultaneous themes of violence and calm, beauty and destruction--magnified, or tempered as the case may be, by the viewer's personal experiences of religion, racial strain, and or acts of nature and violence.

During a recent talk at CCA, Parker articulated that her intention is to create works that are sponge like in their ability to absorb various meanings, determined by the viewer. She does not attempt to rigidly define how her work should be understood, only to create situations in which all of the possible meanings have equal space for consideration. Meaning is of no greater importance than aesthetics and, circularly, aesthetics do not undermine the myriad associations that arise from Parker's pointed decisions. The construction of each work in this exhibition carefully replicates a sense of floating, even though the weightiest of associations are attached to the objects themselves. Intriguingly throughout Cornelia Parker's work meaning and intention are never as simple as black and white-even if, as with this work, that may be where the greatest tensions reside.

New Work by Cornelia Parker is on view at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts through March 5, 2006.