To an angler, five miles of fishing line could be the means to an end of heaps of fish.

Give that much monofilament to an artist and she can create an ethereal room shimmering with columns and arches.

Chicago artist Kathleen McCarthy is spending this week stringing thousands of vertical lines. She uses the fine, clear nylon to create more than two dozen columns, each about 78 inches tall and affixed tautly at top and bottom. They're set in five long rows, nosing diagonally into a corner of the gallery at the University of Toledo's Center for the Visual Arts.

To move from the CVA to the adjacent Toledo Museum of Art, people will have to weave their way through the ghostly columns. Thoughtfully lit, the planes will be almost transparent, depending on point of view. "When you see it straight on, it collapses into a straight line. And from the side, it will look voluminous," said McCarthy, 47.

When the show ends, she will take scissors to the 9,000 yards of 6-pound-test line. All that will remain is some hardware she designed and carefully shot photographs.

Until then, it's a stage set, a dance floor, inviting viewers to navigate the space between columns. And it's an interactive drawing: each column has a slip knot that the viewer can slide down or up to alter the column's shape.

The columns are connected by arches, which McCarthy came to appreciate in mosques when she studied in Cairo.

"There will be rows of arches layers deep which creates an idea of infinity," she said, referring to mosques.

Her solo show, One Point to the Next, opens Sunday and continues through March 17.

McCarthy has done several installations, tailoring cones or spheres or curtains of monofilament to the shape of the site, fashioning barely there spaces and displacement, openness and entrapment, emptiness and volume, materiality and immateriality.

When she was an art student at UT in the 1970s, she loved going into the museum's peaceful Cloister gallery with its four rows of arches reminiscent of a medieval monastery.

Just inside the CVA lobby, McCarthy will install a wall-suspended glass piece she made in honor of Christopher Wilmarth, who died at the age of 44 in 1987. And at her request, the museum will display a Wilmarth piece in its contemporary galleries beginning Monday, said Amy Gilman, associate curator of modern and contemporary art. It's a steel plate attached to a wall from which leans a suspended glass plate.

"It has this very changing quality, depending on the light in the room and many other factors," Gilman said.

In her day job, McCarthy is responsible for a German submarine, the 1968 Apollo 8 space capsule, and 30,000 other items as director of collections at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago.

Kathleen McCarthy will give a free slide presentation about her work at 7 tonight in the Haigh Auditorium of UT's Center for the Visual Arts. The show opens Sunday with a reception from 2 to 4 p.m. in the center's gallery. It continues through March 17. Information: 419-530-8300.

Contact Tahree Lane at:

tlane@theblade.com

or 419-724-6075.

First Published February 16, 2006, 10:05 a.m.