Richard Tuttle is at it again. This inventive and inspired artist, a tireless experimenter, can make art mountains out of molehills. No one has his knack for pasting a bit of string to a torn piece of paper and making it feel like a monumental shift, or his panache for marrying perforated edges to smudges, spirals, and crumpled textures. A fastidious charlatan with finicky facture, Mr. Tuttle can transform lackadaisical marks into singular events, all the while keeping me wondering why I still believe in him. Yet I keep coming back.

This time that meant coming to the Drawing Center. “It’s a Room for 3 People,” a new work comprised of six parts, or “Villages,” opens on Saturday. Parts I through V are a single, large installation; the sixth part, or “Village,” will open across the street from the Drawing Room on February 5, 2005, overlapping for three weeks with the current show.

On Tuesday night I previewed the show in a near-finished state. Amid tools, ladders, and tables stacked with rejected works, I saw parts I through IV (and parts of part V), as the final hang was still being worked out. (I mention this only because I do not believe in making a full assessment of an artwork based on details; and I saw only about 80 percent of the installation, which Mr. Tuttle was still crawling around on the floor assembling.) By Friday night’s opening, when the lighting is just right, I am confident there will be grayish nuances bruising and skittering across the walls and floors with just-so finesse – conjuring feats that on Tuesday were mere twinkles in the artist’s eye.

“It’s a Room for 3 People” reads chronologically and clockwise around the gallery. Each “Village” (all from 2003 or 2004), consists of a sculpture that touches both the floor and the wall and a grouping of drawings that are hung low on one or both sides of the sculpture. Each “Village” has a different temperament, based mostly on the presence of the sculpture and its dialogue with its group of drawings, each of which has a distinct character. Together, the “Villages,” as in a city itself, appear both to add to one another and, to some extent, to cancel each other out.

Mr. Tuttle is best in small measures, when he allows one work to command a long wall. That is when I find I am most intrigued and drawn closer. His small moves then have room to breathe and to paradoxically expand; otherwise, excess leads to mere excess. This show, at times spare, at others cluttered, runs the risk of reading like a wall of children’s drawings framed at the school fair. My eyes, noticing something captivating or catchy, flitted from one drawing to another; I had fun looking, but, possibly because of their close proximity, none of them held me for very long.

“Village I” is comprised of 11 drawings mounted to the left of the sculpture, a curving steel armature attached with pinon and juniper sticks by pieces of what look like coat hangers. The rough yet delicate sculpture seems human, and looks comically like it has stuck its head in the wall. The small drawings or collages, each mounted on a soft, black ground – like most of Mr. Tuttle’s work – feel like doodles and squiggles. Some are mounted in the center of the frame. Others are placed at the sides or in the corners. As a group, they weigh the drawings in a dizzying pendulum swing.

The second work, “Village II,” merges with “Village I.” Its 21 drawings in two distinct groups flank a single sculpted helix. Made of red-and-blue glitter-covered Styrofoam, its sparkling form leans against the wall like a figure with his legs crossed. Its drawings are tightly spaced. Various in temperature and color, the works in the left group, one a hot red and childlike (a drawing of a boat on water?), another of two penciled spirals connected by a makeshift yin-yang over a red smudge, are mounted on a subtle black plaid and contain an inner frame of raised wood covered with sawdust. To the sculpture’s right, the second group is collaged together from mounted sketchbook pages and wavy pieces of wood, covered with a gray wash.

The drawings in “Village III” flank a stacked grid of 28 robin’s egg blue metal-faced rebar boxes. A rebar column is centered in front of the sculpture, directly behind a gallery column. The rebar armature startles like a skeleton removed from its body. Every other drawing is a square, unframed work the same size as the framed work. It is here that a lot of the connections in the show started to sink in for me: I realized Mr. Tuttle is playing with the notion of the frame, of internal and external. He is asking: Where does the inside, the middle, the outside begin?

Mr. Tuttle plays with this theme again in “Village IV.” The sculpture comprises two galvanized metal tubs with two legs on one end. The legs are propped, like hands, against a piece of plywood that is mounted to the wall, wrapped with a chicken wire form, and covered with glitter-garnished pieces of plastic that resemble hand-prints. Wonderfully enigmatic, it is a Donald Juddian contraption gone awry. A body, whose insides are made up of two empty frames, appears to be mounting a work on the wall, which is blank.

From what I saw of “Village V” – in which the wall is painted from floor to ceiling with patterns, some of the works are made of frames without backing, their drawings mounted directly on the patterned walls – the gallery-become-artwork-become-mat-become-frame reaches its foregone conclusion. I am curious as to what will come of “Village VI.”

Mr. Tuttle is grappling with real issues at the Drawing Center; his flutterings, doodles, and sweet nothings continue to keep me interested, guessing, and smiling. I cannot help but think, though, that his talents could be put to better use, if only he would stop questioning and start answering. I wish Mr. Tuttle were interested more in what goes on inside the frame than in the frame itself. His shadow play, on some core level, still feels like an art of avoidance – like fun and games.