The eighth installment of the Opener series featured seven large-scale works by Brooklyn-based artist Lee Boroson. Since 1995, Boroson has been known for his room-filling, inflated sculptures made of sewn-nylon and kept aloft by electric blowers. These colorful enclosures find inspiration in both natural and man-made sources, and many respond to their specific installation sites. One such work, Integument, a buoyant piece designed for the Tang’s vestibule, implicitly compared an often-overlooked section of the building to a layer of skin. Pleasure Grounds, an inflated environment of lily pad-like forms, and Dewpoint, an accumulation of thousands of tiny glass spheres that formed a hanging cloud, offered amalgams of the manufactured and the magical, while Lucky Storm (2) transformed the Tang’s gallery space with streaming sunbeams of fine nylon threads.
Other works in the exhibition grew from the microscopic to the macrocosmic, such as a meticulously manipulated twelve-foot square photograph that attempts to picture the visible night sky with all of its black space removed. Each of the works in Outer Limit commented playfully on “the space in-between”—the space in which our lives take place.