Video, sculpture installation at UW Tacoma gallery

"Inner Limits," a video and sculpture exhibit by New York artist Betsy Alwin, will be on display at the UW Tacoma gallery in May and June.

An installation that playfully expresses concepts of distance, time and geography, "Inner Limits" incorporates video footage of the Pacific and Atlantic oceans and a five-foot kaleidoscope exploring changing landscapes of the earth. A reception will be held in Alwin's honor in the gallery on Thursday, May 17, at 5 p.m.

Alwin, a Midwest native who has never visited the Pacific Northwest, was struck by the distance and geography between the two regions and sought to explore those factors in her exhibit.

"My thoughts led me to consider the phenomenon of parenthetical seas, the country in between and the geological time invested in the landscape," she said. "The overlapping of tectonic 'slow time' and the expansion and contraction of human perceptions of time and space became my focus. The work in this exhibition attempts to convey this overlap through works that portray the immensity of geographical time on human scale."

Alwin received her bachelor of fine arts in sculpture from Minnesota State University and her master of fine arts from Illinois State University. She lives in Brooklyn, N.Y., and has participated in a number of regional and national art shows. She recently received a fellowship from A.I.R. Gallery in Chelsea, N.Y., where she displayed her first solo exhibition.

The gallery is located at 1742 Pacific Ave., across from Union Station. Gallery hours are 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Tuesdays and Thursdays and 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. Fridays, or by appointment. For more information, contact Jamie Kelley at kellej2@u.washington.edu.