LAUGHTER AND MAGIC FILL BLANTON’S NEW ART EXHIBIT

Nina Katchadourian uses her unending curiosity about the world to inspire her art.

“Curiouser and curiouser!” cried Alice (she was so much surprised, that for the moment she quite forgot how to speak good English). “Now I’m opening out like the largest telescope that ever was! Good-bye, feet!”

It is tempting to attribute the title of Nina Katchadourian’s delightfully off-kilter show “Curiouser” to Lewis Carroll’s “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.” In fact, the ingenious Brooklyn-based artist says the name of her big Blanton Museum of Art show is a close fit to her profession.

Constantly in a state of wonder about the mundane world, Katchadourian feels like a “curious-er,” not unlike a “farm-er” or “build-er.”

Still, there’s an “Alice”-like appeal to this large exhibition spread out over several rooms downstairs at the Blanton.

Two wall-sized projects, constructed or reconstructed at the museum by the artist, look like oversize genealogical charts. One is made up of postcards from around the world, including Austin. Katchadourian has altered some of the familiar images with delicate red threads that appear to connect key elements.

She did similar thread work with real, broken spider webs, which she then photographed. The sheer audacity, patience and skill required of this web-mending procedure is enough to tell you that Katchadourian is no ordinary conceptual artist. Too often, conceptual art goes no further than an obscure visual joke that, and once the trigger is pulled, fades from the mind quickly. Not so with Katchadourian, whose humor sticks in the mind for days or weeks.

“You hear people laughing in the galleries,” says Blanton curator Veronica Roberts. “I’ve never experienced a show where people connect to the work and take pleasure in it to this extent.”

The other big chart is “The Genealogy of the Supermarket.” Katchadourian aligns the images of personalities used in food branding and packaging into familial groups. Each time she re-creates the project, she adds local samples, such as Earl Campbell sau-

TAMIR KALIFA/AMERICAN-STATESMAN Paula Benavides traces the fictional family tree, comprised of individuals who appear on grocery store products, as part of “The Genealogy of the Supermarket” by Nina Katchadourian.

CONTRIBUTED This is a still from Nina Katchadourian’s “Under Pressure.” The artist lip-syncs the David Bowie/Queen song over a two-channel video taken in an airplane lavatory.