Many viewers--not to mention critics, curators, and artists--are confused by David Ireland's work. As an artist, he does so many things that he is difficult to pin down. Shall we call him an architect? A sculptor? A performance artist? A furniture designer? Or what he calls himself--a post-discipline artist? "Post-discipline" is an educator's term that suggests getting beyond the established curricula and it does fit, although Ireland may be the only artist of this persuasion working today.

Let's set aside the question of terminology for the moment, because none of these names shed much light on Ireland's output anyway. For all its variety, his art tends to be the product of twin concerns: The sculptural manipulation of natural light and the creation of personalized architecture and artifacts. To make matters more complex, these concerns are often married in a single work or ensemble of works.

The most eloquent statement of his sensibility and methods is his own home. Known simply as David Ireland's House, this frequently exhibited, functional art work is ostensibly a Victorian residence located in San Francisco's Mission District. In fact, Ireland has transformed it into an ongoing sitework that pays homage to itself and his own activities there.

After purchasing it in 1975, Ireland painted the exterior of the two-story house battleship gray, effectively neutralizing it in a city where glitzy, multi-colored paint jobs are the norm. Inside, he removed the walls and doorways that had been added by tenants since the house was built in 1886. He stripped layers of wallpaper, revealing the streaked and stained lath and plaster beneath, which he preserved with coats of highly reflective polyurethane. The amber colored walls reflect and radiate light, lending the space the moody, romantic ambience of an aged Mediterranean villa which has seen better days.

His remodeling of the interior only gradually assumed the status of art work. Dried wads of wallpaper removed from the walls, and bearing the imprint of the artist's hands, are now displayed on a shelf like so many cast paper plaques. Eighteen brooms found in the basement are bound together in a circular configuration. Canning jars filled with dust swept from the floor stand near a bottle containing "100 year old water," which Ireland collected after washing a 100 year old object.

Ireland calls the house an "ongoing personal narrative" and many of its artifacts have been self-consciously recontextualized as art works with a decidedly literary flavor. In the upstairs hallway, a pane of window glass whose crack reminds Ireland of a favorite drawing is displayed freestanding. The opening from which the window was taken is covered with a sheet of copper, and a tape recorder on a nearby stool offers a recording of Ireland's description of the view.

Some of the most poignant works in the house are records of activities involving the participation of others: Tony Labat's videotape of the 95th birthday party of Mr. Gordon, the boarder Ireland inherited when he bought the house, and Tom Marioni's videotape aptly called Repair of the Sidewalk at 500 Capp St. "So much of what I do is living my life," Ireland says, "And art simply occurs in the process." This Zen-derived attitude links him with conceptualist godfather John Cage and contemporary Bay Area (or former Bay Area) conceptual artists such as Terry Fox, Bonnie Sherk, and Tom Marioni.

Marioni--an artist well known in California and Europe for such "social art works" as Café Society, a weekly salon-style gathering of artists crucial for the dissemination of conceptualist ideas throughout California--should be singled out as a key influence on Ireland's art. Although Ireland is the older of the pair, he came to serious artmaking rather late in life. He earned a BA in 1953 from the California College of Arts and Crafts, where he studied industrial and stage design. A number of other professional pursuits followed, including safari leading in Africa, before he returned to art school at the end of the sixties.

In 1974 he received his MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in printmaking. He was attracted to the conceptual/process orientation of such artists as Robert Ryman and Mel Bochner, the likes of whom he met through Marioni and Kathan Brown, owner/director of Crown Point Press. It was at this point in time that Ireland's mature art production began. In 1976 he collaborated with Marioni on Repair of the Sidewalk at 500 Capp St., and was commissioned by him to restore the rear portion of the Museum of Conceptual Art. Working from historical photographs, Ireland describes this task as an exercise in "photo-realism." He found it exhilarating, even revelatory. "There was an issue of truth there," he says. "The project's logic was internal, not formal." It was precisely this quality of internal logic that generated the ongoing development and refinement of 500 Capp St.

Ireland first opened his home to the public in 1978 and almost immediately purchased a second house, 65 Capp St., just a short distance away. He intended only to remodel the single story crackerbox and to sell it. When he completed work on the house in 1981, it had metamorphosed into a soaring, contemporary, two-story house cum light sculpture. Reminiscent of the cavernous, light-suffused Berkeley and Guggenheim Museums, 65 Capp St. is an eminently functional three bedroom residence. With its peaked roof, exterior cloaked in corrugated steel siding and horizontal slits for windows, its exterior suggests nothing so much as a barn converted into a fortress.

Once inside, this impression quickly evaporates. The first time visitor is likely to be stunned by the light filled vista. A curving bridge divides the 18 foot high space and echoes the curving wall in the upstairs hall of 500 Capp St. Using lightwells and dormers, Ireland has dexterously manipulated the admission of natural light to ensure constant, spectacular variation.

At times a literal haze envelops the house, providing a sun-drenched variant on the fog for which San Francisco is renowned. Over the course of a typical day, the light changes so radically that two contiguous, identical gray walls each turn nearly black and white. The effect is meditative, mysterious and reminiscent of the light oriented phenomenological inquiries of such Southern California artists as Robert Irwin, Maria Nordman, and James Turrell, whom Ireland particularly admires.

In November 1982, on the verge of closing the sale of 65 Capp St., he performed a piece called Real [Estate] Art. This ironic ballad--its stanzas punctuated by the mock heroic rolls of an accompanist's snare drum--described his forays among bankers, friends, and family members in search of financing for the continued construction of the house. Once again everyday experience had become grist for Ireland's artmaking mill. The house was sold to a collector who invites artists for residencies culminating in the exhibition of art works especially conceived for the Capp St. Project site, as it is now known.

The two Capp St. houses perfectly embody the twin directions in Ireland's work--65 Capp is itself a light sculpture and 500 Capp comprises a baroque ensemble of personal, architectural and sculptural elements. One might wonder, then, how an artist so linked with these specific sites fares when working off his home turf(s).

For a recent San Francisco show called Tableaux, he dematerialized the architecture of a multi-chambered gallery by covering its windows with scrim-like nylon fabric and/or copper plates, and the floors with white sheetrocking. Eccentric, semi-functional and non-functional, furniture-like objects and assemblages abounded. One room housed "The Sound of Blue," consisting of a recessed niche from which blue light and the sound of a propane torch in the next room burning blue emanated. That space contained the torch, pink tinted natural light, and a fan signed in Duchampian fashion, the ensemble alluding to the classical triad of air, fire, and light.

Ireland rarely calls attention to such details and provides them, one suspects, to both deepen the game for himself and to enrich the visual/conceptual environment for viewers. Tableaux--with its pink, blue, and yellow-lit chambers--also featured a triad of primary colors. Curiously, Ireland's interest in color and light masks a regard for what he terms the "merely painterly" that borders on downright hostility. The problem with painting vis-à-vis sculpture, for Ireland, is that of "having it pass"; of making the painting look like something else, be it abstract or representational. Put another way, the sculptor presents, the painter re-presents, removed a step further from experience.

That direct connection with experience was evident in the most memorable single piece in Tableaux--a beautifully crafted, gray formica cabinet recalling Richard Artschwager's handiwork, and filled with small, handmade, concrete balls. Ireland calls these curious objects "dumb balls," because that's how he characterizes the hand-to-hand activity involved in their making. Although quite handsome, they are particularly satisfying for the nearly literal imprint of Ireland's working method. (They should be considered alongside the wadlike wallpaper "plaques" at 500 Capp St.) As is so often the case with Ireland's art, this laying bare of artistic process both animates his work and endows it with a singularly intense and quirky personality.