How do you filter each place you've lived through the next one? How do you filter your hometown back through them all? Maggie Carson Romano is from a town in Arizona. She's living in New York, but just finished her master's degree in fine art at the University of Washington, so Seattle was her most recent home. Seattle is full of rain; Arizona is full of sun. Carson Romano brings them together, symbolically, in a reflective place: pools.

Her new installation, Pools, is at the bar The Living Room (a place where the owners dearly care about art—they're also starting an artist residency in New Mexico; more on that soon). Pools has many parts. It started with Google Earth satellite images of the outdoor pools in her hometown (including this gorgeous one). She made prints of those, and puts those prints through a photographic print-washing machine that sits in the bar as a sculpture of its own. The machine is fed by humidity from the room—Carson Romano is using the water in Seattle's air to wash the Arizona pool colors. Bouquets of dried papers are set around the room, blending decoration and documentation.

At her graduating show at UW, Carson Romano exhibited a piece of paper the length of her body, embossed with only her freckles. It had been a photograph, but was now a map. In Pools, another large piece of white paper hangs above the couch. From afar, it looks blank, but close up you see tiny pools of blue ink, also embossed (raised on the surface). This is a satellite image of her hometown with everything but the pools erased, washed away. Each little pool looks a little like a bead of sweat on the paper, or a tear—this is Carson Romano's signature blend of delicacy and labor.