Expanding

This morning I finally managed to remember to stop by Stanford's own Thomas Welton Art Gallery on my way home from class to see the current exhibit there, "Expanding." The show consists of pieces by eleven Bay Area artists that, in the words of the curators, "pulls you out of a routine and plants you firmly in the middle of a new perspective by offering a fenestration on the unfamiliar and a new context to the familiar. When contemplating expansion one might think of the expanding universe, the expansion of landscape, or expanding one's mind..."
The piece pictured above is Shims: Thousands of Uses-Use #17 by Christine Lee. It's a number of wooden slats jammed together in a constrained space to create intriguing fluctuating patterns. The installation "alludes to the composition of geological equivalents of sediment transformed by wind...[and] melds the architecture and natural environment seamlessly."
I was also particularly taken with Katie Lewis' Parallel Evidence, another site-specific installation of thousands of pins pushed into the wall in patterns reflecting bodily sensations, with a mirror image of pin holes and numbered markings directly opposite.
I also loved Jesse Houlding's Ferrous Wheel, an intricate piece of machinery that drags a magnet in a perfect circle across the back of a sheet of paper, thus also dragging rusty iron filings across its front that leave a reddish brown trail behind them. Next to the working machinery hangs a roll of paper with a completed circle on it, and it seems to raise up from the paper and even slightly pulse.
I took these pictures with my cameraphone, so they're not the best quality!
Ferrous Wheel, with extra rolls of paper to the side:

Close-up of the filings on their endless journey across the paper:

The finished circle (note the places where falling filings left traces down the bottom of the sheet):

All in all, a very interesting show.