Virginia Overton’s installation on two floors of The Power Station collects tokens of a couple of specific experiences: a road trip and an elaborate opening-night party. For the artist and the participants, these are memories, while for other visitors, they are simply allusions. The difference between these two perspectives will account for a range of responses to the work.

A now-legendary pickup-truck journey through the artist’s home state of Tennessee is the origin of Chevy Deluxe (2012). This is a sky-blue 1984 Chevy full-size pickup truck turned into a light box by means of four parallel pairs of neon lights mounted transversely in the bed and shining up through a blue tarp stretched across the top.Untitled (red light truck) (2011), a rear-view photograph of the original truck with its tailgate down, taken at a stoplight, is available as an 11×17 poster in a Gonzalez-Torres-style unlimited edition.

Other objects are records of the epic opening-night event in January, which featured a pig roasted two ways and a wide cross-section of high and low Dallas society. That evening’s recorded NFL playoff games (Saints/49ers and Broncos/Patriots) play on a 60-inch high-definition screen in front of a row of benches made from 2×12 pine boards and overturned 5-gallon plastic buckets.

The most distinctive works here play with light. Mounted on the lower section of a first-floor window on the southwest wall, ground floor, is Untitled (large mouth bass) (2012), a perforated vinyl window sign depicting the archetypal game fish, as if lifted from the back window of a pickup. Bass fishing, as much as NASCAR or SEC football, is a leisure pursuit with national appeal but a specific cultural and regional base; hence logos like this are displayed with pride as identity markers by devotees. As the light goes down, the bass is easier to see. Upstairs, Untitled (hash mark decal) (2012), in white on a white wall, glows when the light hits it, balancing references to stock-car racing colors on the one hand, and Stella-type shaped canvases on the other. Also upstairs, three works, Untitled (I-beams) (all 2012), mount single light bulbs on the middle of paired 2x4s leaning against the side wall. The best time to see the installation is in the twilight after the sun goes down, when the various light sources mingleinto a many-layered glow and the bass and hash-mark decals shine with contrast.

In 2010, an exhibition at Mitchell-Innes andNash in New York paired works by Overton (born 1971) and Jacob Kassay (born 1984) with those of Robert Morris (born 1931), casting the two younger artists as creative legatees of the gray eminence of postminimalism and process art. (As it happens, Kassay, an art-market phenomenon, is next up at the Power Station, in April.) The present exhibition is decidedly more down-home, even disarmingly so, although it is certainly possible to make mental comparisons with Dan Flavin, John McCracken, or Morris. For me, however, thinking about the differences between Tennessee and Texas was ultimately more rewarding.

All photos by Trevor Paulhus