Don’t be surprised if you do a double take upon entering Oliver Kamm/5BE Gallery. For his New York solo debut, the installation artist Justin Lowe has transformed the gallery’s front room into a realistic facsimile of a corner bodega.

Here are shelves gaudily cluttered with cheap toys, food, and household products, placed upon a dirty blueand-red checkered floor. A refrigerator holds the usual assortment of beer, malt liquor, and fruit juice, as well as a smattering of less-than-appetizing produce. A transparent wall displaying a variety of gummy candies, cigarettes, and scratch-off lottery tickets separates the cash register (and clerk) from the customer; a radio blasts a local Latino station.

Mr. Lowe’s faithful reproduction highlights the visual cacophony of the neighborhood store, its haphazard, sometimes comical arrangement of products – toilet paper next to beer, toilet paper next to bread, rubber balls next to rubber gloves next to rubber bands – and seemingly implausible items for sale, like Big Mama Pick led Sausages or Blink Lollipops (which have a flashing bulb in their center). The artist has added to this effect with several irreverent display decisions such as the placement of Saint Lazarus candles next to Laffy Taffy candy or of condoms beside balloons.

Like some of the stores it mimics, Mr. Lowe’s colorful bodega is actually just a front. Its back wall pivots, disclosing a series of additional spaces, each progressively stranger than the previous. First comes something like a construction site. Moving blankets line the walls of a small alcove, and a wooden staircase leads into the rear of a truck containing a structure of scaffolding, wooden planks, and a corrugated tin roof.

With its floral carpeting, scuffed walls, stacks of beat-up paperbacks, soft orange lighting, and trippy collage posters, this interior feels like a hippie van. Adding to its odd impression are two stuffed coyotes – dressed in sweaters like pampered dogs – that snuggle in a circular well where the gearshift would normally be.They refer to Hal, the coyote that made headlines in March when he wandered into Central Park and evaded chasing policemen for 20 hours before finally being tranquilized.

The journey across the truck and out its front doors leads to Mr. Lowe’s third and most bizarre space. Blanketing the floor from wall to wall is a thick rug made of clothing and linen – socks, sweaters, scarves, sheets – arranged in a pattern of kaleidoscopic circles. Wonderfully soft, its familiar materials practically invite you to sit and relax. Atop the truck, a siren swirls like a strobe light and a recording of clubby electronic music (Mr. Lowe is also a DJ) competes for ear time with the jingle of an ice-cream truck.

Nestled in this comfortable psychedelic landscape, the visitor can finally make some sense of where he’s been. The mysterious vehicle turns out to be a Kool Man ice-cream truck. Mr. Lowe has jazzed it up by adding stickers to the window displays of available frozen treats and, with a bit of paint and ingenuity, transforming the words “soft ice cream” into “soft nice dreams.” This is a pithy summation of his work’s good-vibe intentions.

Titled “Helter Swelter,” Mr. Lowe’s installation presents easygoing summer fun at its best. For those who like theoretical speculation, there is ample food for thought in the transformation of a commercial art gallery into a cheap store whose products can be looked at but not bought. Such conceptual contortions, however, ignore the playful spirit of the piece. Mr. Lowe has repackaged the safety, warmth, and fun of childhood summer in a work of irresistible, light-spirited charm, creating a fantasy refuge from the outside world.

***

Sarah Sze’s “Corner Plot” (2006) juts from the ground or sinks into it, depending on your perspective. The work at Central Park’s Doris C. Freedman Plaza, sponsored by the Public Art Fund, consists of a three-sided pyramid that is meant to represent the upper corner of the building diagonally across the street, on Fifth Avenue at 60th Street. One side of the pyramid is the building’s black rooftop and its silver ledge. The other sides are the two visible, street-facing walls, rendered in the off-white bricks typical of Upper East Side architecture of the 1960s.

Windows along the two walls allow views into the interior, which dips several feet below street level. Inside is a perplexing mess of materials, including stacks of towels, toilet paper, and bars of soap; a light socket; a level suspended by dummy weights, a T-square, and several architectural models; a magnifying glass; two lily pads with drops of water resting in their crevices and a bird’s nest cradling two spotted eggs; a radio and a microscope, both made of brown cardboard; arrangements of pencils, bottles, Styrofoam cups, and Morton Salt shakers; thumbtacks and screws; tape measures, key chains, Exacto knives, a razor, nail clips, and a thermometer; several desk lamps, one of them sprouting barnacles; and a fire extinguisher.

What is one to make of this puzzling arrangement? Some objects suggest a desire to escape, others plans for a long stay. Some contraptions imply rational experiments; others seem like evidence of a mind that has lost its ability to distinguish fantasy from reality. Is the installation an artist’s studio? A bomb shelter? A corner of contemporary New York, uncovered in a future archeological dig? An eccentric’s freakishly cluttered attic?

Though “Corner Plot” asks many questions, it gives viewers little interpretive guidance. But the several pedestrians who stopped to look during my visits seemed not to care. Most were impressed as well as confused, and many stayed past their viewing, leaning or sitting on the work as if it were just another park bench.

Ms. Sze’s previous work has occupied corners and walls of gallery spaces, sometimes even snaking out the windows, and has generally been well-received. The street is a very different venue and the wider public a vastly different audience than one finds at galleries, but “Corner Plot” succeeds as public art. It offers visitors several options – a puzzle to ponder, an opportunity for a bewildered smile, a sturdy perch on which to sit and rest – and is generous enough to allow them to always be right.

Lowe until July 28 (621 W. 27th Street, between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues, 212-255-0979). Sze until October 22 (Doris C. Freedman Plaza at Fifth Avenue and 60th Street, 212-980-4575).