Roil With It

Caleb Larsen

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831 Airport Way S., 501-1231, www.lawrimoreproject.com. 10 a.m.–5:30 p.m. Tues.–Sat. Ends Jan. 24.

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• Caleb Larsen

What's the phrase? A watched pot won't boil. This one does, and beautifully. A seven-minute monochromatic film, Boiling Point depicts the transition from still plane to a roiling mass of fat, silvery bubbles. Watching this ode to the quotidian, your belly roils too at the visible turbulence onscreen, a progression from pinprick dots rising from the silver pan bottom to the zigzagging of popping bubbles, which seem to zing into invisibility at the same acute angle. The soundtrack of these quick movements is tinny and sharp, though as the water speeds to a rolling boil, the noise it generates is more like white static. The screen goes from open white to busy gray (with stops at abstraction), the bubbles' movement and swell occasionally blurred or lit by the shimmer of the water's surface. Created by current RISD scholar (and part-time Seattle resident) Caleb Larsen, this is only one of several strong works by the young artist (born in 1979) on view at Lawrimore Project, part of a group show called "Patch Dynamics." Look left for a spot of frost growing on the wall—a four-inch, electrically-generated, flat-faced snowball, dripping in the heat of nearby bodies—and right for subtle tracks: bulbous black smears that are really slo-mo skid marks dug into white panels by the wheel of the artist's moped. I like the feel and mood of the video piece the best, perhaps because it manages to be both calming and agitating. It's cloudlike, and somehow bloodlike, too, despite its paleness, somehow taking (or telling) the temperature of the room.