Grab a seat in one of the vintage school desks scattered haphazardly about Tacoma Art Museum's spacious Weyerhaeuser gallery and prepare to be immersed in desolate beauty as Mary Lucier's five-channel video installation "The Plains of Sweet Regret" takes you to another time and place not so far away - the plains of North Dakota in the recent past.

Five videos are projected on large screens. Smoothly edited images of bleak landscapes and almost empty roads, abandoned churches and houses and commercial buildings, farmers and cowboys tell the tale of hard-scrabble people trying to hang on amid changes to their romanticized lives. Cameras pan desolate fields of grass and lonely roads. We feel as though we are running through the tall grasses until we come upon an empty church, an abandoned home, a grain elevator that's seen better days. We witness a farmer at work, a calf being born and finally kaleidoscopic images of a rodeo, all set to music composed by Earl Howard and punctuated by the country song, "I Can Still Make Cheyenne," by George Strait.

Read Alec Clayton's full review of Mary Lucier's "The Plains of Sweet Regret" in the Music & Culture section.

MARY LUCIER: THE PLAINS OF SWEET REGRET, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Wednesday-Sunday 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., until 8 p.m. third Thursday, through Feb. 8, 2015, Tacoma Art Museum, 1701 Pacific Ave., Tacoma, $8-$10, 253.272.4258 or www.TacomaArtMuseum.org