You know that terrible precipice minute, the one before the alarm goes off, when you wake up, see the time, and just lie there waiting for the awful thing to go off? That moment lives forever in Kirk Lang's sculpture Passage, a doorway with a grid of 60 alarm clocks on it.

Each clock is set by hand, and the time moves across the grid of clocks second by second. One clock turns 12:01, then one second lapses and the next turns to 12:02, then the next, after a second, turns to 12:03. A minute has been collapsed into a second, but if you look at the entire grid, then that minute has also been expanded into an hour, because the grid of 60 clocks show the time of each minute of an hour at all times.

At first, you don't notice that there's any movement at all among these glowing, ominous red faces. But then, you can't stop seeing it, grinding across the space, directing everything, locking you in. Time is both meaningless and pressing down on everything. A 61st identical clock sitting on a bedside table next to the door sets the dreamlike tone. Is being locked into time the dream or the awake state? And again, that feeling: the alarm is going to go off.

Lang's first show at Gallery4Culture (today is the last day to see it) is a departure from the old-timey kinetic sculptures he exhibited at the 2007 UW MFA show. In these six wall-mounted sculptures, all dated 2009, he's toying with stillness and motion in new ways, mostly domestic. A still-life nightstand jutting out from the wall at an angle is clearly the nostalgic property of a man from a generation or two ago, but it does not move nor is particularly moving or rich. A work called Self Installed involving a hammer, a spring, a hand crank, and a label that says "Please Do Not Touch" may involve a pun or a joke, but I don't know what it is. A wall-mounted, opened laptop with cord plugged into the wall is painted entirely blue—almost Yves Klein blue. It's okay as a symbol, but a little hard-boiled.

The show is strongest when Lang balances his Joe-Builder-skills and his immaculate aesthetic against the prospect of something uncontrolled, as in the threatening army of alarm clocks so cleverly and tightly set up (and yet so controlling to us as viewers) and in a somewhat lesser but still interesting piece called One for Every, made of a map of burnt matches with gaps that reveal disconnected words and that still smells like fire.