ART GONE WILD NOMADIC MUSEUM CLAIMS TERRITORY ON SANTA MONICA PIER.

Byline: Steve Rosen Correspondent

The Nomadic Museum in Santa Monica is the high-minded, fine-art equivalent of a traveling circus. It comes to town, puts up a temporary shelter, offers a show with lots of exotic wild animals, and attracts visitors with promises of spectacle.

But in this case, the animals are contained in photographs and on film. There are gloriously high-contrast, supersize sepia-tone prints suspended like trapeze artists by the thinnest of wires. And on motion-picture screens, the animals move slowly or are caught in close-up in sometimes romanticized, sometimes stark natural settings.

In these images men, women and children trustingly pose next to animals - a kneeling boy reads a book in front of a kneeling elephant, a cheetah cranes its neck toward a woman standing in water, a woman and orangutan touch hands, and more. There is a reverential tone to the work somewhere between a peaceful dream and a prayer. The images seek to humble viewers with their solemn intimations of sacredness.

The human subjects are residents of faraway locales - Ethiopia, Namibia, India, Sri Lanka, Borneo and other Third World sites. There are Buddhist monks and dancers among them. Canadian photographer Gregory Colbert has been traveling the world for 14 years to create the images he now displays in a traveling (thus ``nomadic'') show he calls ``Ashes and Snow.''

And rather than a tent, the temporary museum just north of Santa Monica Pier is constructed of 152 recycled, brightly colored steel cargo containers, stacked 34 feet high. Some of the public-area exterior walls are covered with tea bags. The building encompasses 56,000 square feet and, to the unsuspecting, looks like a part of Long Beach's shipping yards has washed ashore at a resort. The entranceway has 1 million tea bags from Sri Lanka affixed to it, as a commitment to recycling.

The inside is like a secular temple - vast and open with its darkness interrupted by dramatic lighting that illuminates the photographs. One walks on a pathway past cardboard columns. On both sides are Zen-like rock gardens. Soothing yet active instrumental music can be heard throughout. The space, designed by Tokyo architect Shigeru Ban, is meant to be an object lesson in the mysteries of beauty.

``The metaphor is that people look at the outside of the building and say, 'It's rusty.' It's the same way with people being judged,'' said Paul Hawken, president of the ``Ashes and Snow'' operation. ``Then you go inside and see that it's beautiful. And people are beautiful inside.''

Judging from the initial response, that's a message a lot of people want to hear and see. On a recent Saturday, the Nomadic Museum was crowded with awed, quiet visitors. Admission is $15; the show will run until May 14. Then the building will be dismantled and many of its components will be shipped to Asia - probably Japan or China - for the next stop. At the same time, Colbert will have a special photo exhibition at the Vatican. Last year, the Nomadic Museum visited a Hudson River pier in New York City.

In an interview, the photographer fretted about what he sees as a world in which human life is out of balance. ``In all the indigenous cultures that were created, everyone sought out an expression of their emotional relationship to nature,'' Colbert said. ``In all of our human history, there were all kinds of interactions with other species. Now we confine ourselves to cities; we maybe meet with a pigeon or a dog.''

He compares this state to aphasia, in which stroke victims lose the power of speech. ``If we isolate ourselves to this extent, it's like having a slow-motion stroke. You sever the language that's so fundamental to who we were,'' he said. ```Ashes and Snow' is an attempt at collaborating with these different species, without the human beings being protagonists. We're following their (the animals') lead.''

Following the animals' lead means ``running on their rhythms,'' according to Colbert. For his series on whales, he worked for 2 1/2 years. To find his human subjects, who are paid, he goes on walkabouts in natural habitats and shows his portfolio to get them to understand his goal. He sometimes works with the same people over several years. Then, he says, it's a case of them and him winning an animal's trust.

``Sometimes it's frustrating because you feel as if you're waiting to be asked to dance,'' he said. ``But when it comes together it's so much better because these aren't journalistic natural-history photographs. It's coming from that same place as jazz music or dance.''

Colbert's pricey work has interested collectors. In 2002, the administrators of the Venice Biennale art exhibition invited Colbert to show in the large, spacious Arsenale. The photo installation was a huge hit and attracted the patronage of Rolex Corp. managing director Patrick Heiniger. Rolex now pays an undisclosed amount to sponsor Colbert.

Colbert has used the money to hire architect Ban, who also is designing the Pompidou Center's new museum in Metz, France. Colbert, too, subsidizes some of the Nomadic Museum's expenses through his sale of prints, books, posters and catalogs. Hawken, head of Colbert's nonprofit business operations, said it cost several million dollars to bring the Nomadic Museum to Santa Monica. The museum is paying to bring schoolchildren to see ``Ashes and Snow'' for free, and has hired youth from low-income areas to serve as local staff at $15 to $18 per hour.

Heiniger, who was in Santa Monica for the opening, explained in an interview why Rolex backs Colbert. ``Gregory is an exceptional artist. For our company, we thought it was time to share his exceptional artistry with the world,'' he said.

And Heiniger is particularly excited about the upcoming Vatican show, which he says is at the Vatican's invitation. ``If you look at Gregory's art, there are no politics, no money, no religion. There's a universal message that's ecological. It's about peace in this world that's so disturbed now.''

ASHES AND SNOW

Where: The Nomadic Museum, Santa Monica Pier.

When: 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. Tuesday through Thursday, 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday, noon to 7 p.m. Sunday; through May 14.

Tickets: $15 for adults; available at ticketweb.com or [phone]. For more information, visit ashesandsnow.com.

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The Nomadic Museum - composed of 152 steel cargo containers stacked 34 feet high - houses the more than 100 large-scale photographic works and three accompanying films that make up the exhibit ``Ashes and Snow.''