Just as memory fragments allow the past to inhabit the present, so do shafts of light become single moments in the continuous flow of time.

Deborah Lefkowitz, a contemporary visual artist and documentary filmmaker whose works have toured world galleries since 1994, creates large-scale, site-specific multimedia environments, or “installations,” by combining fabrics with film, light and sound.Lefkowitz has been invited as an artist-in-residence by Sacramento State as a part of the Art Department?s 10th annual Festival of the Arts.

In “Light Chambers III,” Lefkowitz brings together historical, symbolic links and the aspects of the “complex relationship of time” as a bridge between the past and the present through projected images and sounds.

The images are excerpted from the film footage of Lefkowitz?s award-winning documentary film “Intervals of Silence: Being Jewish in Germany,” about the legacy of the Holocaust in a small town in Germany where her husband was born.

Elaine O?Brien, assistant professor in the Art History Department, said that Lefkowitz wants viewers to participate and bring their feelings of the past and of their personal losses.

“It?s poetics of memory,” O?Brien said. “We accept the way we are. But we must remember and cannot forget the past.”

At the exhibition, which Lefkowitz turns into an “enormous loom,” visitors walk through floor-to-ceiling fabric screens, on which black-and-white images are sequentially and rhythmically overlaid in three-dimensional forms.

“In my installations, fabric creates a subtle interplay between tangibility and elusiveness, between what can actually be seen and what must be imagined?or remembered?with the mind?s eye, between passages of light and darkness,” Lefkowitz said.”It?s like a stage. It?s theatrical,” O?Brien said.

The artist will speak in the Hinde Auditorium in the University Union at 5 p.m. April 10. For more information, call 278-2787.

The exhibit at Robert Else Gallery in Kadema Hall begins at noon ? 4: 30 p.m. Monday through Friday, March 18 to April 19. The reception will be held at 5 p.m. on the first day.