Through April 30.

The present sculpture in Suyama Space--a gallery within the offices of the architecture firm Suyama Peterson Deguchi--is by Annie Han and Daniel Mihalyo, a young couple who run a small but emerging design business called Lead Pencil Studio. Lead Pencil Studio's office is on Capitol Hill, Suyama Peterson Deguchi is in Belltown, and the sculpture that occupies SPD's gallery is called Linear Plenum. Instead of offering a precise meaning of plenum, I will instead share this beautiful passage from The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, under "Stoicism": "Considered as a whole... the universe is a vast, rational (orderly) animal, perfectly spherical in shape, a plenum [space entirely filled with matter] held together and shaped by the tonos (strain or tension) that is God himself."

The artists/architects of Lead Pencil Studio have filled Suyama Space with lots and lots of string--millions (it seems) of simple white strings hang from the ceiling. Most of the strings fall to the floor; others are cut at varying lengths that correspond with or remark on an aspect of the gallery's interior. No strings hang from a silver duct that spans the gallery. The stringless space forms a passage that just happens to be there because the duct is there. Some of the strings are green. The green strings are clustered deep within the white strings. All of the green strings fall to the floor.

At the north end of the gallery there is a restroom designed by George Suyama. The restroom bulks from the wall, and looks like a white box made of frosted glass. The restroom glows when occupied. On the opposite side of the gallery, there's an empty space where the strings have been cut in such a way that they shape the restroom's invisible other. But this is not a negative twin, a doppelg...nger restroom; instead of the aggression one would expect from a nothingness that issues from a thing's absence, what is felt is a soft affirmation, a void that warmly recognizes the presence of the solid.

While a person enters the restroom to shake hands with an old friend, one enters the nothingness of the restroom's double to experience the best view of the sculpture. It is dense and numinous and impossible.

Daniel and Annie write: "Altogether the piece took six weeks from beginning to end. Two weeks for material research, acquisition, testing, and prototyping. Two weeks for material preparation, length calculations, cutting, burning the ends of each piece. Two weeks for installation, seven electric staple guns, scaffolding, 5:00 p.m. to 2:00 a.m. weekdays, longer on weekends.... We use everyday building materials whenever an installation offers a choice. In this case we used common masonry line. We ordered 100 miles of line and if we account for waste plus trimmings during installation then we used just under that amount. There are 19,000 lines, the longest being 22 feet and the shortest 12 inches."

The result of all this devoted labor is a work that plays with the eyes, or, as my friend and architect Jerry Garcia put it, makes the eyes happy. From the guest book at the gallery's entrance: "It takes my equilibrium away"; "It reminds me of rain"; "It's heavenly"; "My sense of volume is overwhelmed"; "It's ethereal." "I call it a blizzard," an employee of Suyama Peterson Deguchi says, as she hurriedly leaves the office. In a word, Linear Plenum is not specific but suggestive. Like objects and animals that appear suddenly in the shapes of clouds, these suggestions are not only dependent on your position but also who you are (the content of your character, your memories, and present mood).

On the rather wet day I visited Suyama Space, part of the sculpture suggested to me what in the early '80s was imagined to be the experience of consciousness flowing through the circuits of cyberspace. At another position, I imagined it to be a late-afternoon shower seen through an open window in an old Japanese film by a director like Kenji Mizoguchi or Yasujiro Ozu. At yet another point, the green in the middle of the sculpture's density suggested a phantom forest.

To conclude, here is a revealing quote from Gilles Deleuze: "The labyrinth is no longer a circle, or a spiral which would translate its complications, but a thread, a straight line, all the more mysterious for being simple."