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Recently it seems like museums have been overflowing with exhibitions that foreground the materiality of art and the art-making process, churning out show after show to warm the cockles of every formalist's heart. New York's Museum of Art and Design in particular seems to have made this focus the core of its program, with compelling recent offerings that celebrate such specific art stuffs as paper and once-living organic material. Now MASS MoCA has joined in — perhaps a bit late — with "Material World," an exhibition of seven artists who transmute ordinary, usually slightly dowdy ingredients into artworks that aim to transcend the material by aiming at its heart and shooting through into something else.

Occupying two floors of the institution's epically-proportioned former textile mill, an appropriate context for such explorations, the show is an engaging, family-friendly survey, though one that is more uneven than one might hope. Some of the works, all commissioned for the space and intended to interact with the raw brick-and-wood setting, set out to dazzle with special effects. Tobias Putrih's Re-projection: Hoosac, for instance, consists of countless threads of fishing line stretched in a rising canopy from one side of a long room to its far wall, forming a tunnel that visitors can walk through. A light fixed to the ceiling bounces off the transparent strings, creating a corona that morphs as one walks around the piece. It's fun and engaging in the manner of a perception-probing exhibit at a children's science museum — a comment that could be made of much of Olafur Eliasson's work, too — but it's ultimately thin, and it's not helped by the show's inclusion of a strikingly similar piece, Alyson Shotz's The Geometry of Light, which also strings transparent material (piano wire, bits of plastic and mirror) across a room and lets light play off of it, albeit to lesser effect.

Other entertaining works include Dan Steinhilber's Breathing Room, which fills a smaller gallery with plastic sheets that are made to billow out from the walls in puffs and then draw back through the use of noisily whirring fans. We all need a little breathing room sometimes, and enveloping white simplicity of the sheeting and blown air combines to create a calming influence. (The artist may have thought it was too calm — after assembling the piece, he tore a ragged gash in the plastic lining the floor, introducing a note that in no way helps the composition.) Elsewhere, for Lightning Generation, Michael Beutler created a fanciful workshop space, with a hand-driven setup to score and mold aluminum sheets into long square beam-like shapes. An array of these finished objects, which echo the timber used in the museum's construction, are leaned against the walls, rising the full height of the room like glittering squared-off tree trunks. The presence of the tools used to make the shapes, and of rolls of raw aluminum, suggest the installation is a work in progress, and that the artist just left the room.

The strongest piece in the show — worthy, in fact, of being exhibited on its own — is Orly Genger's Big Boss. Using approximately 100 miles of knotted rope that the artist acquired from diverse sources (climbing ropes from suppliers, for instance, and literal tons of stringy defective lobster rope that failed to sink when tossed in the ocean), she has filled two adjoining rooms with a domineering orangish-red-painted mass. In one room, it appears as an almost monochromatic wall of rope that rises from the floor to the ceiling, evoking abstract painters like Rothko and Barnett Newman with its sheer expanse of redness. The rope then literally bursts through the wall, passing through a gash in the drywall into an open, columned space where the rope riots, unfurling itself in places as pleated sheets resembling tongues, or waves, or lava floes while elsewhere coiling up into flexing biceps. It's a muscular tour de force, an eruption of color that turns the rope its composed from into an incidental element — as if anything could be knotted out of rope — while at the same time emphasizing the material's weight and texture. That the artist herself is on the petite side comes as a surprise, given the physical effort that radiates from the piece.

Genger's work shares a room with a component of another piece by the duo Wade Kavanaugh and Stephen B. Nguyen, whose White Stag occupies a corner of the room and then wends up to the floor above to take over one of MASS MoCA's signature huge towering spaces. The piece is made entirely of paper, twisted into a dendritic monster resembling a copse of spooky trees; its underbelly dangles with stringy root-like stalactites, while other parts of the installation reveal little chambers resembling hollowed-out tree trunks. Like Big Boss, the work achieves a heaviness from what are thought of as light materials, and an expansive scale from something considered small. But while White Stag impresses with its ability to fill so much space so cheaply, the overall whiteness and frilly twists in the work make it seem like the set for a wedding that took a somewhat dark turn. The artists should honestly consider event design, where this kind of installation would have a knockout effect.

Rounding out the show is Eli Levenstein's Reading Room for MASS MoCA, a room of recycled furniture — bubble-wrap chairs, sewn pillow throws, and a large bubble-wrap table containing books featuring the artists in the show. A snaking green electric cord draws a line on one wall as it leads to a hanging light bulb, and paths of cloth lead from one end of the floor to the other like roads in Candyland. It's a nice place to sit and relax at the end of a tour through the show and muse on the obsessiveness required to make art, and to wrest ones own meaning from material.