‘ TIME MACHINE: THROUGH THE WALLS OF A TIME TRAVELER,’ BY J USTIN GARCIA

The piece: “Time Machine: Through the Walls of a Time Traveler”

The artist: Justin Garcia Where: Nicole Longnecker Gallery, through Wednesday

Why: I can’t decide if Garcia’s installation is brilliant, insane or just audacious. Alongside groupings of paintings that look like fragments of ancient walls are a gazillion tiny drawings, diagrams, small photographs and Post-It notes, connected by red string that zips up to the ceiling and back, across the room, just in case visitors don’t realize all the ephemera is connected.

The artist is giving viewers a glimpse inside his brain, which is obviously busy, and illustrating his theoretical model — “Humanity’s Sustainable Initiative” — which has something to do with mapping the human perception of time between two points of existence, reality and subconscious. Garcia’s 2015 book, “One Ton Goldfish: In Search of the Tangible Dream,” delves even deeper into his thinking and painting processes, which are driven by everything from philosophy to quantum physics. The small photographs on the gallery’s walls suggest the artist’s progress as a painter, through phases he calls seven layers — the seven styles of work through which he has been developing as an artist during the decade or so he has been painting. An ambitious attitude, clearly; most artists dismiss their early years as a time of experimentation. Garcia calls the show’s 75 newwall fragment paintings his eighth layer. Hung in groupings with names such as “Concrete Jungle” and “Waiting Station to the Rabbit Hole,” they look as if they were salvaged from disappeared buildings and pieced back together, like puzzles.

These are all the layers I need to be a happy viewer, really: Each distressed-looking piece contains a sense of mystery and depth that needs no explanation — even if all one wants to do is admire the artist’s deftness with paints and canvases that must have been a bear to shape.

Garcia’s work also is on view in “Walls of Time: Down the Rabbit Hole and Back” at the Beeville Art Museum, through Dec. 17.