Photo By Ben Blackwell

Paul Kos‘ "Pawn" (1991) is a dot matrix image of a chess pawn constructed using 2,500 chess pieces, none of them pawns.

Plenty is bold, bright, loud and brilliant in Everything Matters, California conceptual artist Paul Kos' 30-year retrospective at the Contem-porary Arts Center (CAC). It's easy to be drawn in and swept up by the more colorful, noisy works of Kos' past 15 years.

Just don't miss the whispers of some of his subtler works, like "A Trophy/Atrophy". It's a three-minute, one-liner video filmed in the 1970s. In it, Kos stares into the camera. To his right, mounted on a wall, is a double-headed sheep. Kos' head whips to the right, then back to center, in a loop that parallels the image of the two-headed sheep. As the video loop speeds up, Kos' face turns ghostly with movement, and a voice repeatedly whispering "a trophy" stirs into a frenzy of haunting, unrecognizable sounds, building with anxiety and creepy double imagery. The film abruptly ends, fading into another in a long series of self-made mini-films, which include, among many other episodes, Kos lighting a fire by magnifying light through a sheet of ice, two trains drawing away from one another and a cow licking the camera lens.

Your patience is rewarded if you're willing to watch the video installation, especially if you're up to imagining how high-tech this portable video stuff was back then -- you know, the early '70s.

Kos would remind you that everything matters, from those early, esoteric films to his ornately constructed works of the last 10 years.

The evolution of his Kos' use of video is evident in the 1989 "Tower of Babel". By that time, Kos was constructing architecture to hold all that moving imagery, in this case a swirling, vaulting tower. Twenty television screens offer close-up shots of speakers, singers and whistlers of various nationalities, races and ages. Enter the tower, lean close to each monitor, and you'll hear the individual voices that build into a whir of deep, intertwining tones. The tower, arguably the most complex piece in Kos' exhibit, occupies a central place, and the open-air floor plan of the museum allows the tower to spiral skyward, and the sound of speech to reach all corners of the Center.

And while we're on the topic of religious imagery, architecture and television, and at the risk of ruining a delightful surprise, I must mention the actual-size replica of a stained-glass window at Chartres Cathedral in France. The piece is titled "Chartres Bleu", and only by closely approaching the curved surfaces of the 27 panels stacked end-to-end do you realize you're seeing 12-minute video on 27 television screens, not sunlight streaming through colored panes. The stunning piece shines even more brilliantly in its perfect position at the bottom of one of the Center's insanely long flights of stairs.

The double entendre of Everything Matters precisely describes the career of an artist known for his meticulous detail, tremendous focus, austere integrity and clever humor. Almost every piece in the exhibit includes an inner element, matter within matter. "Tunnel," a wheel of Swiss cheese, holds a tiny toy train rumbling through its holes. In "Not Whole," a knot hole (get it?) in a wood panel flickers in shades of blue -- come closer and there's a small-scale video visible through the hole. "Pawn," a large, dot matrix image of a chess pawn, is actually constructed of literally thousands of chess pieces, none of them pawns. Kos' insistence on assembling work using the actual materials presented shows his dedication to purity and the importance of symbols culled from the material world. Powerful symbols, especially pawns and bells, infuse his work with sound and meaning.

And within the sound and meaning is another, subtler nod to a participant in his experiments: time. A candle balances a bell on a teeter-totter precariously suspended on a broom handle, sturdily standing where Kos left it one day while sweeping and stopping to daydream ("Equilibre IV"). Once lit, the candle will eventually melt, and the bell will ring.

In "The Sound of Ice Melting," Kos placed eight boom microphones around two silent slabs of ice, in a desperate attempt to record their movement. Most profound is the 1990 Cold War commemorative "A Matter of Time," which consists of 15 cuckoo clocks, representing the 15 former Soviet Republics, their faces removed and their structures painted Stalin-steel gray. Kos replaced the weights with a variety of hammers and sickles that fluctuate the clocks' chimes. Consequently, you can't predict when one of the clocks will burst out its cheerful tone, mimicking the hollow-sounding trumpeting of artificial cheer bursting from a land where society ran like defective clockwork.

Kos' obsessive attention to small, symbolic items blends superbly with his large-scale conceptual works. The collective cacophony of whispers, cuckoos and bell tolls audible throughout the exhibit constantly reminds you that a life's work exists in these galleries, weaving influence and evolution throughout. A few mediocre pieces felt more like filler material than important career moments, but perhaps the rug with a hole cut in it ("Caucasus Carpet") would thrill me more if it weren't surrounded by a career's worth of tremendous sights, sounds and insights. The evolution of a stunning art career is well documented and superbly presented in this expansive retrospective. Grade: A