Edges & Boundaries

Edges & Boundaries invited artists to examine the lines that shaped our lives; visible and invisible, imposed and chosen. In the Pacific Northwest, boundaries appear everywhere: coastlines that redrew themselves with every tide, riverbanks that held and released, mountain ridgelines that split weather systems, and clear-cut borders that exposed the politics of land. Using “the edge” as both subject and framework, the exhibition asks what happens at the threshold where one state became another.

This exhibition features work that considered literal borders, geographic, architectural, and infrastructural; as well as metaphorical boundaries, social, cultural, psychological, and ecological. Artists explored sites of transition such as fences and property lines, zoning maps and survey marks, shorelines and floodplains, doorways and corridors, skin and surface, language and accent, citizenship and access, intimacy and distance. Across approaches, the work engages boundaries as systems: how they were drawn, enforced, negotiated, or dissolved, and who benefited from their permanence.

Rather than treating the boundary as a fixed line, Edges & Boundaries…