Turns out, though, that our friars had a eye for interior decorating; they lined their famous Palermo crypt with the fantastically arranged bones of their dead brothers. The elaborately configured skulls, assorted bones and even fully assembled skeletons dressed in habits inspired the most recent work in Marti's upcoming "Crazy Quilt" installation at Philadelphia University's Design Center — relief sculptures of flowers, vines and insects that turn out to be formed of plaster-cast bones.

DOES THAT MAKE ME CRAZY? Virgil Marti's "Crazy Quilt" exhibition at Philadelphia University's Design Center incorporates moths, flowers, bones, antlers and Farah Fawcett posters. : mike m. koehler

Marti's take on the Capuchin bone chapels isn't morbid or gothic, though — it has very little to do with this summer's faux-Goth denatured death's-head chic — but oddly delicate and graceful. The lit-up flowers and moths held together by finger and pelvic bones have already been on view at Elizabeth Dee Gallery, which has represented Marti since 2004, and now they'll be on view for much of the fall at the Design Center, a midcentury ranch in Germantown also known as the Goldie Paley house for its former inhabitant, a painter and the mother of former CBS chairman William Paley. "Since a lot of my work has to do with plays on domestic interiors, the fact that it used to be a house made sense, and it was a good size," says Marti, who is skinny and mild-mannered with close-cut hair.

The show hasn't been explicitly advertised as a retrospective, but it's the first time that Marti has shown more than one body of work at a time. Three rooms of the house will be used, each one consecrated to a different facet of Marti's oeuvre.

"It's a little nerve-wracking. If you're an installation artist, you never know for sure if it's going to come off and look good till you open the show," he confesses.

The first room, besides the bone sculptures, displays an antler chandelier similar to the one first seen in Marti's installation Grow Room in the 2004 Whitney Biennial. The second room focuses on older work and Marti's inspirations, "1970s kitsch and ephemera," from Farah Fawcett posters (with which Marti also decorates the bathroom in his Old City studio), to vintage beer cans (and Marti's 1997 beer can wallpaper, the oldest work in the exhibition).

The items the Design Center is adding from its own collections, such as tortoiseshell combs and a stuffed hummingbird fan, mostly play on Marti's other big theme, that of nature forced into our decorative schemes. The antler chandelier belongs to this category, as do mirrored tortoiseshell sconces that burst into bloom with rhinestone-coated cacti. To some extent, so does the third room's landscape wallpaper, a blacklit panorama originally created for PAFA that combines psychedelia with a whiff of the nuclear, a radiation-invigorated forest.

"I think it started with the landscape wallpaper. Before, it was easier to characterize my work as being about kitsch taste and outdated '70s ideas about decoration. But I think at a certain point I started to think about nature and artifice and natural motifs as interpreted through decorative traditions. The decorative grotesque in rococo or Renaissance, the plant and animal forms fused together, a plant that becomes a fish..."

Marti is the T.S. Eliot of kitsch sensibility; you need more than a working knowledge of centuries of painting, architecture and literature to understand the allusions, which reach back far beyond the 1970s. For instance, Grow Room borrows from Whistler's Peacock Room, created in England and transplanted across the Atlantic to Detroit and then Washington, D.C. "I liked the idea of the room as this beautiful skin," says Marti. He recounts an episode from the French writer Huysman's 1884 novel Against Nature, in which a decadent nobleman sequesters himself in his house, which he turns into a sort of sensory museum. Light reflected off a turtle with a jewel-encrusted shell accentuates his carpet, an example of "the animals that went to service our accessory delight," says Design Center director Hilary Jay wryly.

Clearly, unlike the dour, civilization-is-fucked Eliot, Marti's sensibility is much more arch, even (or especially) when working from '70s civilization-is-fucked dystopias like Soylent Green. The nature film euthanasia scene inspired the artist's blacklit wallpaper room in which it will be screened along with several of Marti's other movie touchstones, ranging from cult classic to New Wave highbrow: Logan's Run, L'Avventura, Last Year at Marienbad and The Man Who Fell To Earth. The room in which Bowie's alcoholic alien plays ping-pong is another source for the wallpaper. The Design Center, only a few hundred yards from the Wissahickon Gorge, is an ideal setting for Marti's fusions of nature and artifice; in a few months, the lush woods will probably look exactly like the Fell to Earth's autumn forest wallpaper — only without the Astroturf floor.

A born-again local boy, Marti grew up in St. Louis, Mo., before relocating to Philly in the late '80s as a grad student at Temple's Tyler School of Art. And he never left. After graduation, he stayed at the Fabric Workshop for a long time and is now a master printer. He's won several fellowships, including the Pew in 1995, and has exhibited all over the country. Of participating in the Whitney Biennial, he reflects, "I think it made people outside of Philly more aware of my work." He also secured his gallery representation. But here he will stay, he declares. "The great thing about Philly is there're lots of alternative spaces and artist-run galleries, so if you're a young artist right out of school you can actually have shows, and I think that's better than making a painting and keeping it in your room."

(r_frankford@citypaper.net)