Carolina Silva has not yet landed. Her imagination is floating somewhere between Spain and Seattle. She physically moved here a year ago from her homeland with her husband, a scientist, and this month makes her Seattle debut with a show of drawings, sculptures, and animation at Lawrimore Project called Against Gravity (or the Oddity of the Flooded Land).

Each piece is a portrait of suspension. Pairs of smaller-than-life hands sculpted out of oven-bake clay are captured performing arcane tasks, stranded between languages (verbal and non). They're quick sketches balancing lifelike sections with areas of blatantly bad mimicry—plainly the work of another, hidden, pair of hands (the artist's).

The Bridge is a stop-motion animation made of charcoal drawings that Silva scanned and negativized so that they look like chalk on a dark board. She then doubled each image so that the video shows not one girl sitting at a table but two girls sitting across from each other. They make a drawing on the table's surface that spins out of control and turns into waves that drown them.

Each work is also driven by pairings. Some are twin poles that make for imperfect doubles, like Bellevue and Seattle—Silva has been observing the bridge-linked cities during her time here. Her sculpture Time is an hourglass of sorts; a line of sand flows down from a box on the ceiling onto the edges of a tilted table and chair that break its fall, fracturing its measurement of time into uneven mounds—another imperfect double.

A delicate child of indeterminate gender appears in several drawings. He/she stands on a table or a chair or tries to crawl under a rug, the patterns of the furnishings appearing on the surface of his/her transparent skin. These are ghosts trying on environments.

Mystery, melancholy, disorder, horror—all are in Silva's current and past work, seen most recently in last spring's installation at La Conservera Center for Contemporary Art in Murcia, Spain. That show included smoke billowing from the long-dead smokestack of the former factory building, animated drawings of a child disappearing over and over in different ways (climbing into a hole, being swallowed by a tree root), and dark circular rooms with searchlights and glass ladders and doors that locked behind you after you entered (an axis of influence might include Goya, Kiki Smith, and Robert Gober).

Against Gravity marks the appearance of a new apparition in this foggy city. recommended