Liminality: Art On The Threshold

Liminality: Art on the Threshold, a new exhibition at the Exploratorium, on view from March 8-June 3, 2007, builds on a rich history of boundary-bending projects that play with the Exploratorium's home, the airplane-hangar-like Palace of Fine Arts interior. Liminality: Art on the Threshold experiments with the Exploratorium's public space using the metaphor of thresholds as a unifying theme.

March 8 Opening Party Features Additional Performances and Site-Specific Installations for One Night.

This exhibition will feature large-scale artworks that create an artistic drama and a heightened awareness of the architecture within the Exploratorium. Artists include Seattle's Lead Pencil Studio (a.k.a. Annie Han and Daniel Mihalyo), Erica Gangsei, Alex Clausen, Paul Andrew Hayes, and Seyed Alavi. Works include Erica Gangsei's architectural crocheting in the rafters of the Exploratorium. Alex Clausen will create stacked large-scale assemblages that seem to defy gravity. Paul Hayes' hanging large-scale aerial works use delicate materials like fine wire and crumpled paper to make a huge statement. Seyed Alavi sculpts "air space" using suspended light bulbs choreographed to go on and off. Lead Pencil Studio of Seattle will be in residence. Their outcome is to be determined.

A special, one-night-only event and celebration on Thursday, March 8th includes additional artists from a variety of disciplines, who will be invited to create site-specific performances and installations that animate the Exploratorium's cavernous space for that night only, from 7-11pm.

Opening night installations and performances include members of Project Bandaloop, a leading aerial and dance company (and guests), performing excerpts from Portal and Loft; an array of the hugging, thumping, rolling robotic machines of Kal Spelletich; Ulrika Andersson's installation of 300 battery-powered blue LED's (with smoke); video performance by Joshua Kit Clayton; and Joe Mangrum's Exploratorium-specific mandala.
To make advance reservations for the opening night celebration, please visit www.ticketweb.com. Liminality is included in the price of admission to the Exploratorium

The word "liminality" is often used by anthropologists to describe the imaginative psychological space engendered by rites of passage. At this exhibition, visitors will be able to enter this "free mind" place of transitions and think about how the treatment of architecture affects the way we feel within the space, and how it does, or does not, encourage us to relate to the space, as well as to each other. -- www.exploratorium.edu