It’s probably a good thing that the ingenious setup of Totalities, the new Chris Johanson installation at SoHo’s Deitch Projects, first sends attendees inside the wooden dome structure that forms the exhibit’s centerpiece before spurting them out into the gallery proper. If visitors saw the worryingly jerry-built construction from the outside first, they might be wary of exploring its interior. Like the other, smaller sculptures in the mixed-media showcase (September 4 – October 25), the haphazardly nailed “space temple” is made of recycled wood, mostly salvaged from Brooklyn dumpsters. Johanson’s abstract, bold-colored paintings are also daubed, in great textured swaths, onto odd-shaped slabs of refuse timber.

The eco-theme is in keeping with the Californian’s stated focus on the beauty of the natural world, but the rickety carpentry, along with the half-broken chairs and scraps of carpet elsewhere in the exhibit, lends a bleaker, post-disaster feel to his environmental concerns. In a collection of smaller images, Johanson’s simplistic, outsider art-style figurative technique makes these existential anxieties explicit. In one a small blue-green orb sits in a jet-black sky. “The Next Place?” reads the caption, and it’s all too easy to imagine the impressively bearded artist painting his sad pretty colors, alone in some future wasteland