Brink and Boundary began with this invitation: Pause, look, and listen. The exhibition inhabited areas of the Katzen Arts Center that are often overlooked and forgotten—its emergency stairwell, entryway, elevator and exterior. Brink and Boundary was a call to reconsider and to find moments of heightened reflection in these most unlikely of places.

Consisting of four individual artist projects, Brink and Boundary asked visitors to participate in multimedia and multisensory works by artists Halsey Burgund, Hasan Elahi, Alberto Gaitán, and Adam Good. All four projects provided thoughtful (re)discoveries of the museum’s interior and exterior and encouraged an exploration of our surroundings, our senses, our histories, and our everyday encounters.

In Hotel Dreamy, Halsey Burgund built a soundscape around the exterior of the Katzen. Accessible with a smartphone app, this seemingly invisible audio installation was filled with recordings of participants on the topic of dreams. Each voice had a particular home in locations around the Katzen, which visitors could contribute to with their own recordings. With this collective voice, Burgund encouraged exploration of the Katzen and all its exterior spaces, which are often ignored.

For Sky, Hasan Elahi transformed the Katzen’s elevator, filling the ceiling with an image of the underbelly of an airplane. This was not a serene skyscape, but one in which visitors are voyeurs on unstable ground. By removing any indication of the plane’s destination, contents, or purpose, Elahi continued his work on the subject of surveillance and transportation, and created a different experience of a space we are accustomed to passing through hurriedly, passively.

Alberto Gaitán’s Untitled filled the Katzen's cavernous, three-story emergency stairwell, typically closed to the public. Gaitán transfigured the concrete stairwell into a contemplative space, filling the columnar stairwell with contrasting fields of sound, modulated by and mixed with the acoustic sounds of visitors’ bodies, movements, and their WiFi-enabled devices. Gaitán expanded the potential of the Katzen’s architecture, and created interactions for visitors with the sonic environment.

Installed around the main entrance to the Katzen, Adam Good’s Untitled (portraits) posed the question: what happens when written text is fragmented and remixed? Does it still possess the same authority? To explore such inquiry, Good activated an area primarily used as a thoroughfare. Filling the space with lyrically floating pieces of text from the scholarship on artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres (1957–1996), he invited passersby to consider how words change, and achieve new potentials, in their new configurations.

Cover Image: Hasan Elahi, Sky, 2014.