Challenging the norms and senses to which the viewer is accustomed, two new exhibits exploring divergent concepts will premiere Thursday at The Rose Art Museum. Fred Tomaselli's "Monsters of Paradise" utilizes a hallucinogenic and abstract collage-like painting style, and "Chambers," constructed by former Brandeis experimental music Prof. Alvin Lucier, combines everyday objects with mismatched sounds.Fred Tomaselli's "Monsters of Paradise" takes many different objects and bright colors placed in repetitious ways to boggle the mind of the viewer. The multimedia pieces go beyond the paintbrush, employing an assortment of items including magazine cutouts, pills and hashish leaves.

According to Acting Rose Director and Curator Raphaela Platow, Tomaselli uses a "cacophony of things to create mind-altering paintings." In each piece, objects are placed on a flat wooden base in layers and covered in resin, which, upon drying, holds the objects in place. Tomaselli's works range from the deceptively simple to the impossibly complex-in some pieces, barely a blank space can be seen.

Having grown up in the 1970s, Tomaselli looks to the period's psychedelic culture as an influence. His paintings portray deceptively simple concepts: life, nature and the human body.

"Tomaselli's work occupies a very unique position in the art world," Platow said. "We thought it would be great to bring the show here."

"Web for Eyes" (2002) combines leaves with swirls of blue, pink and yellow over a striking red background. The resulting hypnotic effect draws the viewer into a nonsensical pattern, taking cutouts of human eyes out of their usual context and abstracting them.

In the much more complex "Heavy Metal Drummer" (2004), 12 arms-each composed of cutouts of smaller arms and hands-flail wildly around one body. The background consists of pressed leaves and photographs of ears arranged in striking lines.

Unlike "Monsters of Paradise," Chambers is not merely a visual exhibit. It combines ordinary objects with ordinary sounds in a disarming fashion. Eleven everyday objects are placed on individual white pedestals, each containing a speaker constantly emitting repetitious sounds. The noises used are all very different from what the viewer might expect. The sound emerging from a thimble, for example, belongs to a train whizzing down a railroad track.

Lucier will hold a November concert at the Rose in the same space where he performed with legendary experimental composer John Cage 40 years ago. The show will consist of electronic music pieces and will not employ traditional instruments.

In the 40-year interim since Lucier taught at Brandeis, his Chambers exhibit has traveled around the globe, changing each time. To him, the objects are chambers for the sounds, the gallery a chamber for the objects.

"The exhibit plays with resonance of sound in different spaces," Exhibit curator Stphanie Molinard said.