NEW YORK, NY.- A gun, a bottle of Jack Daniels, a splatter, a million beads. With these details, California artist Liza Lou tells you stories. And just a minuscule bead, she explains, is like an underlined word: It can focus your attention and slow you down.

“Beads highlight what is ordinary and make you look at it,” said Lou, known for her life-size beaded sculptural installations, including “Kitchen” (1991-96), in the collection of the Whitney Museum, and “Back Yard,” acquired in 2002 by the Fondation Cartier. She was speaking recently in front of “Trailer,” another massive construction, originally made 25 years ago and filled with tens of millions of Czech glass beads. It just arrived at the Brooklyn Museum in New York City.

Lou, 55, has reached a turning point in her career, as she transitions from the objects that put her on the map — the Museum of Modern Art recently acquired a beaded teacup and saucer — into more abstract work, all created with her favorite material, which she called “tiny messengers of pigment, dot size expressions of joy.”

Carmen Hermo, a curator who worked on the “Trailer” installation, said, “There is a tenderness to the attention that Liza pays” to every detail and bead placement. The meticulousness of works like “Trailer,” she added, “just kind of messes with your mind. There’s something so everyday but also very uncanny about it.”

Lou, a feminist artist and art school dropout who received a MacArthur Foundation (“genius”) grant in 2002, started her career thinking big and small simultaneously, with “Kitchen,” a full-scale replica — down to the dishes in the sink, an actual refrigerator, a box of Frosted Flakes — composed of perhaps 30 million cylindrical beads, according to one estimate. She created it entirely solo, beginning in 1991; it took five years to complete.

It was followed by “Back Yard” and then by “Trailer,” the final piece of what she sometimes thinks of as an Americana trilogy. It asks questions about whose labor is valued and how, about self-sufficiency and isolation, about gender and power. It is also winningly flecked with humor, rewarding close observation.

“Trailer,” which Lou worked on from 1998 to 2000, fills a 35-foot-long midcentury Spartan Royal Mansion mobile home. The museum had to remove its back doors to roll it into place. A gift of collectors Sherry and Joel Mallin — he is a trustee — it will be on view in the lobby indefinitely.

Its grayscale interior tells a very different story from the primary-colored, pop art-esque delights of “Kitchen” and “Back Yard.” It is more narrative and masculine, by design.

It’s also a league away from the abstract expressionist bead-laden paintings in her sold-out exhibition at Lehmann Maupin, on view in its New York gallery through Oct. 12.

In Lou’s mind, if you look out the window of “Kitchen,” past “Back Yard,” maybe down an alley, you’ll see “Trailer.” She bought it from some desert homesteaders, in part for its shape — “really, a little sinister,” she said.

In America, she said, “it turns out that often trailers are the last place a person lives. ” (This one, she noted, has a particular coffin shape.)

Once she cleaned it out, she began to think: “Well, what happened in here? Who lived here?

“I wasn’t going to just be talking about leisure,” she added. “I was going to be talking about loss.

“My material tends to get people all kind of giddy,” Lou said. “Like this ‘Ya — hoo! Cocoa Puffs’ kind of reaction to the beads. And I wanted to just drain all that and sort of take the viewer by the hand through a darker and darker place.

“The darker place was in the ‘Kitchen’ and those other works too,” she continued, just “not quite so apparent.”

Lou doesn’t sketch much, but she may first paint her patterns out. Often working on her hands and knees, she lays strands of beads on a glue-covered surface, painstakingly pushing them into place with a toothpick. “To me, it doesn’t feel intense,” she said. “In my head when I’m doing this, I feel like I’m making sweeping gestures — like I’m skydiving.

“It’s a sense of fascination,” she went on. “Like, how could you physically do that? How would you put this tiny material on an entire 35-foot-long room? That sounds impossible and really hard. And then there’s this big piece of me that’s like, ‘Hell yeah, let’s do that!’ It’s just crazy how much fun it is to me. It’s funny to me that it’s weird to people.”

Lou had some assistance for bigger parts, like the walls — a “surreal wood panel,” she called it. The flooring throughout the trailer is based on an Egyptian pattern. Even in monochromatics, the glint of beads gives everything an almost Vegas pizazz. “I love pattern,” she said, citing Henri Matisse’s shapes and the wit of Marcel Duchamp as inspirations.

“I think about the beads themselves almost in a literary sense — word by word, sentence by sentence,” she added.

The portrait she was building was of a solitary person whose objects — hunting gear, girlie magazines, booze — suggest a stereotypical macho-ness. It’s all so palpably lifelike, it seems as if smoke could rise from the ashtray.

Until “Trailer” she had never put a human form in her work. Then she added a leg with an Oxford shoe in the bedroom, a revolver nearby, the sound and light of an old film noir blaring behind a door. She was circumspect about what the scene represented.

“I think that as an artist, you’re dealing with your own mortality,” she said, “in the making and describing of a certain life.” The object she’s most proud of in “Trailer” is a typewriter, surrounded by crumpled paper and a handwritten note: “Keep your eyes on the road to liberty.” Strung together, the tableau was a tale too.

“All the furniture is built; it’s all papier-mâché. You can’t sit on anything in the trailer. It is an actual bottle of Jack. I’m not going to say whether or not I drank it.”

Applying a delicate material like a seed bead to a weapon — “Trailer” is filled with blades and guns — made her laugh. “It’s twisted,” she said. “It’s wrong. It shouldn’t be done.”

Lou began experimenting with abstract images, the focus of her gallery show of framed canvases that combine beads and paint, after she returned from almost a decade in South Africa, where she worked with a female collective of bead artisans. Back home in Los Angeles, she thought she was done with the material; she donated her entire 30-year collection to her studio team. But they kept cropping up, including in a shipment of her belongings from South Africa: totally new beads. “They keep stalking me,” she said, pointing to a gold orb wedged into the grooves in her sneaker sole.

For her show at Lehmann Maupin, she mixed Japanese glass beads with paint and applied them with a brush, building undiluted “strokes” of beaded color and texture that was quickly permanent.

“I’m trying to make the heroics of painting even more heroic,” she wrote in her artist’s statement. Like Jackson Pollock, she didn’t premeditate, letting pigment land where it might — her own commentary on the male stars of 1950s abstract expressionism, in which, she joked, “every brushstroke is a penis.”

Viewed closely, her work looks organic, like a vibrant coral reef that teems with hidden life, and some resembled the emotionally intense brushstrokes of Joan Mitchell.

Lou sees a connection between the decades-old “Trailer” and her newest paintings, which she was itching to get back to making in her studio in Joshua Tree, California. “It’s like taking masculinity with a twinkle in your eye,” she said.

When Lou started out, the divide between what was considered art and craft was still bright. “Why wasn’t Native American basketry looked at, taken seriously and understood?” she said. “Why weren’t they seen as the first abstract artists?”

While she never borrowed directly from Native American traditions, “I certainly was arguing for its importance through using beads,” she added. “I’m saying, this is just as valid as paint.”

And it’s more elemental than that. Examining paint under a microscope, Lou saw clusters that, she said, "look just like beads” — or like microorganisms, cellular life itself.

“It turns out that everything, underneath, looks like a bead.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.