Spring appears to be here, and with it comes that ritual purge known as spring-cleaning. For me, this annual throwaway is fueled by a mild form of memento mori, the uncomfortable knowledge that if I died tomorrow, someone would go through my things. And what would that person think of my collection of British academic satire? All those broken Walkmans? Spare buttons for pants I no longer own?

This is the question invoked by Kathy Glowen's Petland, albeit in a much prettier manner. (Perhaps you've seen Petland already; it was installed at the Tacoma Art Museum in 1998, a year during which I had my head firmly up my ass and wouldn't drive south for anything less than a visit to my alcoholic boyfriend. You could piece this story together from a shoebox full of Amtrak ticket stubs and coasters from Portland strip clubs. But enough about me.) Glowen has taken all the worldly possessions of one Mamie Laura Rand, a Spokane lady who died in 1995 at the age of 101, and channeled them into an installation that creates a portrait of a life in negative space.

One-hundred-and-one years is a lot of time in which to pile up earthly goods, and Mamie saved them all. "Petland" is the name of a pet store that she operated out of her home, and Glowen's installation is populated by the ghosts of thousands of animals, represented by feedbags, eggs, empty cages, ribbons awarded for prize poultry, and boxes of something called Chaperone ("makes your dog behave in the house"). But this is not a passive inventory--it's a sculptural installation, one life used as a lens through which to see another, and it's often hard to know where Mamie ends and Glowen begins.

One piece, For Life, is made up of an old-fashioned bed frame buttressed all around by feed sacks that have photos sewn to them with all manner of buttons, both simple and ornate. There's a perfect cone of loose corn--650 pounds, to be exact--on the floor under the bed and rising up through the frame. This more obvious artistic license suggests that Mamie's most personal life was subsumed by her business or her love of animals, that perhaps she measured time in pounds of corn. But what do you make of a shadow box filled with religious items? Is it an altar of Mamie's or a construct of Glowen's? Would Mamie have meticulously arranged dried flowers in a dish like a Sailor's Valentine? Would Mamie have glued her butterfly collection to hundreds of tiny gilded tags? And if so, why? I tried to engage a young security guard in conversation about the divide between artist and subject; he said, not at all mischievously, "If I knew, I'm not sure I'd tell you."

He's right, of course. Because the third participant in this experience is the viewer, and to tattle on the artist turns Petland into an anthropology lesson rather than a work of art. It reminds me of a strange and lovely story by Siri Hustvedt in which an impoverished narrator takes a job that requires her to whisper minute descriptions of anonymous objects, such as a soiled glove, into a tape recorder. "The more specific I was about the glove's characteristics," the narrator discovers, "the more remote it became. Rather than fixing it in the light of scientific exactitude, the abundance of detail made the glove disappear." This is exactly Petland's effect: Instead of making you all sociological about each object, the act of viewing makes the object disappear into something larger and vaguer, something less prescribed. A life.

Glowen, in her artist's statement, echoes this sentiment: "The passage of time is relentless in its ability to obliterate the vestiges of human existence." So that the entire collection of Mamie's dresses is not so much indicative of fashion at mid-century, but is a portrait of a woman who owned a lot of housedresses but only one party outfit. That said, Petland is a little too sweet for my taste; admittedly I look for different things, was missing the more sinister feel of things slipping into the past. That, however, tells you more about someone who saves the relics of a sad relationship but gives away a now unfashionable birdhouse collection. Spring-cleaning has begun.