Dannielle Tegeder at Priska C. Juschka

The cables, pipes and wires that serve New York lie as deep as 800 feet underground, we're told, prompting the question: what does the world beneath a city look like? Artist Dannielle Tegeder assays one fanciful answer through drawings that use ovals, circles, rectangles and other geometric shapes, often connected by lines, to create fictitious blueprints of buried infrastructures. Containing such ominous-sounding features as "Male Center Production Headquarters," "Ellipse Information Routes" and "Multi-square Human Networks," these tidy and somewhat mad schematics in ink, pencil, acrylic and gouache on heavy paper evoke the kind of crackpot earnestness one finds in the work of outsider artists.

Tegeder is no outsider, however, but a talented draftswoman whose upbringing in a family of steamfitters afforded her familiarity with the milieu of pipes, valves and boilers. In this show of seven drawings and one installation (all works 2004), she enriched that mechanical insight with her experiences in Africa and South Asia, far-flung exposure that is reflected in her works' overlong titles, which reference, along with satirical jargon and technical double-talk, such distant locales as Mali, El Salvador and Saudi Arabia.

The results are whimsical, if detached, fantasies of a kind of planet-wide infrastructure that threatens to overwhelm deeper, more authentic personal feelings. For example, Bamoshan ... (Tegeder's titles can approach a paragraph in length) parodies a schematic drawing of a subterranean power center--the artist delineates ground level at the top of each drawing--centered on a "love dot boiler," an oval container apparently filled with heated molecules about to turn into "affective" steam. BaskraPataci seems to be a diagram of electrical and hydraulic systems hooked into an underground furnace---or perhaps it limns the flow of emotions in the hidden realm of the heart. One wonders if her buried pipe and cable works are systems to circulate human feelings--including, perhaps, the artist's--or to evacuate and vent them.The standout piece was Floating City, a mixed-medium installation consisting of a 20-by-4-foot mirrored platform on which Tegeder laid out dozens of handcrafted objects. This three-dimensional version of her drawings embodied, according to a press release, a "concept of an urban utopia." Like her drawings' titular allusions to a kind of global sensibility, this term-paper conceptualization of urbanism distracted from the real strength of the work: Tegeder's ability to fashion small, complex items out of quirky materials. Displayed like commodities in a department store were towers made of plastic tubes, miniature modernistic sculptures fashioned of wood and paper, snaking strings of beads and a cardboard sphere that revealed an intricately constructed interior. Marvelously created and intriguingly arranged, the objects offered a dose of sheer physical immediacy that was more affecting than the fancy yet ultimately extraneous allusions to cities utopian or dystopian.