Carmen Vetter, "Fading Gray." Photo courtesy Traver Gallery.

At Traver Gallery right now, Carmen Vetter’s messing with your eyes. The Portland glass artist is new to Tacoma: she’s shown mainly around Portland, and once at Vetri in Seattle. But she thoroughly deserves this solo show.

In “Fading Gray: Patterns on Polarization,” which opened Saturday, Vetter plays with black and white like a hypnotist toying with a subject. Her large square wallblocks of glass are layered upward with glass frit, like a sand-sculpted wall relief, in patterns of black and white (and occasionally orange.) Her symmetrical lines, curves, stripes or dots fade in and out of each other, playing games with our depth perspective. At a distance, they seem like optical illusions, as if the lines are rising up out of the picture plane. But when you get close, you realize that they are, in fact, doing just that, like sand-dunes of powdered glass. Together, they make up an abstraction of identical echoes, a 3-D Bridget Riley.

Vetter’s work is gorgeously textural, as well. The black bits are like ground embers, the white like powder snow. In “Hot or Cold” the black curves open like a theater curtain on an iridescent orange inferno, almost radiating heat.

Carmen Vetter, "Hot or Cold." Photo courtesy Traver Gallery.

Other pieces play with insinuation. “The “Fading Gray” series engorges whorls, like thumbprints. “Circumlocution” flattens three ellipses until they peer out, like evilly slitted eyes. “Will the Circle be Unbroken” explodes outwards in a fiery ball of light and dark orange, the glass raised up in fierce, gridded bumps. Her three vitreograph prints (the only paper works) are delicate mosaics of tiny circles, gently random raindrops to the glass sculptures’ intense geometry.

Traver Gallery is open 10 a.m.-6 p.m. Tuesdays-Saturdays, noon-5 p.m. Sundays. “Fading Gray” is up through March 8. 1801 Dock St. #100, Tacoma. Free. 253-383-3685, www.travergallery.com