Rachel Whiteread at the MFA: It takes a village

Courtesy the artist and Gagosian Gallery, London. Photograph © Mike Bruce. Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts.

Rachel Whiteread is one of the bright young English artists of the 1990s whose work never fails to rouse both supporters like collector Charles Saatchi and those who think modern art a conceptual scam. She hasn't become as famous outside the art world as Damien Hirst and some other contemporaries, maybe because making cement casts of the empty spaces inside things is not as, um, edgy as slicing up freeze-dried animals. But when she cast the inside of an entire house, she made a few headlines. Now she's at the MFA with a two-part show that's half great and half meh. (In the Globe this morning, Sebastian Smee finds the whole exhibit a disappointment. The Times was more enthusiastic.)

The underwhelming part consists of two rooms barely populated with a few works on paper and scuptures, most notably a couple of casts of old doors. Except for one rather lovely image of an old blue door on graph paper, there's nothing here to ignite the non-conceptual brain. It looks like the MFA was scrambling to build an exhibit around Whiteread's centerpiece, an installation called "Place (Village)," and came up short. But.

The largest version and U.S. premiere of an installation she's done twice before, "Place (Village)" comprises a darkened room with 200+ dollhouses Whiteread collected over the years, from antique to modern, arrayed in tiers atop their shipping crates. In its current version, the work is arranged in three rough hills, so that the viewer walks in the valley between them, as if out for a night stroll in some English suburb. But it's not that simple.

The dollhouses are lit from within, but they have been depopulated and emptied of furniture and adornment - literally, the lights are on, but nobody's home. There's no explanation, nothing but a sense of emptiness and dread. "Place (Village") is quiet, still and spooky, yet at the same time strangely vibrant and alive. You're unsettled, but you don't want to leave, either. You're prompted to wonder about the lives that took place in those empty rooms, and why they ended. That may be too "narrative" for the artist's intent. But there's no denying the exhibit has a strong effect.

I strongly recommend you get in to see it before Halloween.