Diana Al-Hadid, a 27-year-old Syrian-born artist based in Brooklyn, opens her first major solo show in New York this week. Her large-scale sculptures are informed by classical and gothic architecture, labyrinths, science, Greek mythology, biblical lore, paintings in the school of Bruegel and Bosch, and—like her previous installations of gloriously macabre organs and staircases—"failed attempts to reach God."

Here, her crux theme of God-ward ambition refers to the story of the Tower of Babel and what Al-Hadid calls "our Babel": Geneva's Large Hadron Collider, a 27km-wide machine developed to re-create matter that existed at the genesis of the universe by way of slamming particles together in a manmade Big Bang. Among other things, the work in her new exhibition Reverse Collider is informed by these seemingly disparate concepts (an Old Testament tale and a Swiss-Franco quantum physics experiment), and the parallels she's drawn between the two: working at the limits of technology, the analogous effort to explore the origins of the universe, each construction's resemblance to "an architectural telescope to reach God," and their shared impending sense of danger.

Show: September 4th through October 9th, 2008 at both Perry Rubenstein gallery locations in New York City.

Image: left, Bruegel, right, Al-Hadid