Tyler Budge Installation at 950 Gallery

photos courtesy 950 Gallery

Whichever way the wind blows

By Alec Clayton

Liminal at 950 Gallery is a fully immersive art installation by Tyler Budge, who

teaches sculpture at University of Washington Tacoma. The term “liminal” is defined as the space between what is and what’s yet to come. Budge’s installation explores these spaces both literally (physically) and metaphorically.

“Our paths are filled with liminal moments — doorways/thresholds that transport us from a structured understanding of where and who we are to an undefined space,” Budge writes.

This multi-media installation explores these transient moments. The gallery is a house under construction with two-by-four studs for walls and openings for windows and doors. Open windows — both within the construction and the actual windows of the gallery — invite visitors to look out, in or through. Visually, it is abstract art, like a three-dimensional Mondrian painting. Metaphorically, it represents the uncomfortableness of not knowing exactly where you are or which way to go. There are tiny red-orange windsocks everywhere being blown in one direction or another by fans controlled my motion sensors. Standing in the interior space looking at the windsocks, I was reminded of the line from Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” “It don’t take a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.”

There are many birds: porcelain birds perched on shelves, a video of birds on a wire, delicate line drawings of birds in complementary colors drawn directly on the wall. Some of the studs are both geometric and organic, straight along one edge and curving sensuously on the opposite edge, and many of the stud edges are lined with simulated moss.

There is a very large moose head mounted on one wall with its shadow painted in a beautiful cobalt blue — the same blue repeated across the gallery where flocks of birds perch on shelves. And finally, mounted to a window are 27 photographs of houses with attached windsocks.

“The space is found under construction, divided into smaller rooms by classic wood house framing construction. One is confronted with familiar structures, while maneuvering thru framed doorways and glancing thru framed windows,” Bulge writes. “Expectations are curbed by contradiction — the outside is structured, predetermined, confined and orderly, but the interiors are vast, open vistas — serene yet placeless. The interior spaces speak of possibility yet provide no destination… One is left directionless.”

Visitors to the gallery are invited to feel the unsettling lack of direction, and perhaps relate it to the hubbub of modern life and their own place in it.

Liminal, 1-5 p.m. Thursdays (until 9 p.m. Third Thursday), or by appointment, through Dec. 19, 950 Gallery, 950 Pacific Ave. Suite 205, Tacoma, 253.627.2175, www.spaceworkstacoma.com/gallery.