If you're the first visitor of the day at Western Bridge, you might be there before the irises are delivered and before the four liters of water scooped out of Puget Sound have been poured onto the raw concrete floor by the gallery attendant for the exhibition Devouring Time.

The water is enough to fill a pair of human lungs. By the end of each day, it leaves only a stain. This is Drown, by Emilie Halpern. The bouquet of purple irises that arrives each day is placed in a glass jar, and left there. Over the course of the exhibition, the neatly arranged rows of jars on the gallery floor get filled sequentially, and the flowers wilt and brown in their place, leaving a progression of deathiness. That's Untitled (congratulations), by Matt Sheridan Smith.

A few years ago, Smith made a work that involved throwing a sculpture off the side of a boat into Puget Sound; all of his work is about "never really finding a resting point," he's written, "or else if so, an improbable one." How Western Bridge itself will end is as yet unknown.

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