Evoking outdoor splendor inside an Atlanta gallery

Bottom line: Ethereal, visually appealing work that never quite convinces there is much going on beneath the surface.

Charleston, S.C., artist Joe Walters has created an installation at Marcia Wood Gallery in the Castleberry Hill neighborhood built on the idea of bringing the splendor of the outdoors inside.

Curling, twisting vines laced with flowers and leaves hanging on monofilament from the gallery ceiling are the artist’s fixation in “Ascension.” Like floral versions of beaded curtains, these thin garlands of flowers and leaves with the tight corkscrew shapes of grapevine tendrils are crafted from largely human-made elements: metal wire and mesh and a layer of polymer clay blended into an allusion to nature. The pieces are then finished with layers of sand and paint to render texture and heft.

The front room of Marcia Wood Gallery is dominated by those dangling silver shapes reminiscent of Spanish moss with its atmospheric, lilting, dripping forms, so much like nature’s set dressing.

The rear gallery features similar botanical themes, but with a very different execution. A series of sculptural forms are affixed to the gallery wall, their skeletons of wire covered with a mix of polymer and paint the color of dried blood that gives them the corroded look of a tin roof or a metal tractor left too long in the elements that has begun its process of decay. Though most of these rusty forms evoke fungi, daisies, seed pods, pitcher plants and vines, a smaller group of pieces have the plump, basket-like appearance of bird’s nests.

Rather than exact replicas of nature, the artworks in “Ascension” are self-aware impersonations crafted in veneers of metallic silvery-white and a gritty rust that make it clear Walters is not striving for an exact replication. With their ghostly silver color and the decaying ambiance of rust, the works also strive to suggest themes of death and decay.

Of the two bodies of work in “Ascension,” it is the cascading, sensuous silver vines that seem to speak most successfully to those themes of death and regeneration emphasized in the show’s exhibition notes, which state: “For Walters, the continual cycle of germination and decomposition is an ongoing metaphor for the fragility and brevity of human life.”

Also emphasizing that idea of death and decay in a corner of that front gallery is a small stacked arrangement — like a campfire — of broken and decayed tree branches, rendered in those same silver tones. The wood, stacked haphazardly, jagged and weathered, bears an eerie resemblance to bones. That piece is the most concrete example of Walters’ professed desire to make those botanicals metaphors for the shared natural world and human tendency to fade to dust.

But more than consistently compelling mouthpieces for ideas of either death or regeneration, “Ascension” registers most fundamentally as a mood piece: poetic, ethereal and well-rendered, but neither consistent enough in its methods or evocative enough in its execution to convey emotional or intellectual depths beyond the work’s pleasing surface appeal.