Justin Beachler’s Enterface with the recent past at Subterranean

The environment that Justin Beachler has created in the basement space that is Subterranean Gallery feels cozy and familiar — as cozy and familiar as the screen you spend your days and nights gazing into.

Unlike what commands your attention on a monitor or in your palm, though, the images that Beachler has assembled to make Enterface — culled from the Internet for their color or their reference to digital culture — can’t be swiped away. They are instead locked into flat prints, unchanging screens and physical arrangements. They are persistent but static, bright and brightly colored and slick yet not flashing. You move. They stand still. And when you approach one — say, a picture of a yellow smiley face hovering against a somewhat pixilated psychedelic background — you start to wonder: How long should I stare at this, at anything digital?

The answer is implied in how well each work complements the others to reflect the artist’s feelings about what the Internet has done to us — particularly to people younger than he is, who didn’t grow up with dusty technology such as cassettes and VHS tapes or live through the Reagan years. People of that younger generation, Beachler’s art reminds us, are nonetheless fascinated by the signifiers of that last pre-Web culture: smiley faces, surf fashion, the 1980s. He’s sharing inside jokes with us, made with a living language colored purple, pink and orange and used to make fun of the very hashtags it employs.

It’s clever: Internet image art about post-Internet art being shown live and also fed back into the Internet for real-time consumption. (Naturally, it’s set to music from composers or curators who share their music only via the Internet.) It’s even somewhat critic-proof, given that Beachler is in part responding to how commentators (among others) tend to use the adjective “post-Internet” only with reservations, if not pejoratively. One of his defenses: You can’t purchase any of these works outright. The itch for ownership is scratched by a tender system that involves third parties; if you want, say, “IKEA ANTIFONI ZONEOUTSTATION,” your money goes to an Amazon seller, and Beachler ends up with an animal-print sweater. Other exchanges include candy, cans of Arizona tea and a tropical-themed shower curtain. This keeps the whole process online, Beachler says, subverting the intent of the art market.

The Subterranean, founded in 2010 by Ayla Rexroth and passed to Melaney Mitchell in mid-2013, feels like the ideal place for this show. It remains a vivid counter to more sterile art spaces, and its stone walls, concrete floors and overhead ductwork add up to the right chilly backdrop for these 20 scattered installations, this Internet you can walk through. (You have to make an appointment to see the art; also requiring reservations is a handful of events related to this show.)

Mitchell and partner Kevin Heckart have set out to expand their gallery’s conversational reach by focusing on a series of digital-based exhibitions. (A “PDF Club” conversation, titled “Internet Art (after social media and new economies),” happens at 7 p.m. February 26.) Enterface, the second such effort, opened February 6 with what could have been billed as an Internet-themed party. People mingled under clamp lights casting violet hues, picking up fruity candy (gummi worms, multicolored twists and Starbursts) from trays, and cans of fruity drinks from a tub. In the kitchen, next to a Crock-Pot of dip, red-flavored Colt 45 malt stood in a glass pitcher like sangria. There also were mai tais to be had, more consumable props, signs from the online world bought to real-life form.

For all that, it was a relatively quiet party. People stood about, talking to friends and taking turns piloting a female avatar around the version of the gallery that Heckart had built in Second Life. For the gallery’s first “IRL URL” exhibition, miniature versions of Beachler’s installations had been erected online in a virtual Subterranean Gallery, which you can visit from your own online device. Several unknown characters showed up at the opening via Second Life. They generally spent their time dancing.

Meanwhile, cameras, including one posted to watch whoever was controlling the Second Life avatar (“Melaney”), were streaming various snippets of what was happening at the opening — along with a view of the Second Life version — on twitch.tv/subgallery (a place where spectators gather to watch others play online games like Call of Duty and Minecraft).

After I went home, I learned from a Facebook post that Rexroth was one of the viewers, looking in from New York. I got on Subterranean’s event channel and tried to process the difference between having just been in the space (with unknown parties watching) and spying on who was still there.

So it’s all very meta or “alongside of,” all this replication and social sharing of versions of things, the bright images captured from the Internet and regrouped into Internet-referential compositions that have been printed out, frozen onto screens or replicated as 3-D objects. These are things we choose to keep constantly in our faces, and Beachler means for us to “enter” that loop from a different vantage, then “interface” with what we find there.

It worked on me. Beachler’s art serves up bits of what, in a visual sense, my brain “remembers” from my own thousands of hours of clicking, reading, scrolling, status-updating and sharing. He has essentially detonated the Internet and put the shrapnel in a tangible setting — one that happens to be strangely pretty.