In July of 2008, Josh Pavlacky and Zach Davis began remodeling their garage, clearing their overgrown backyard, roto-tilling the connecting alley, and transforming their home and surrounding unused land into Appendix Project Space. You'll find their homebrewed garage gallery down the south alley between 26th and 27th on NE Alberta.

In starting Appendix, Pavlacky explains, "We weren't interested in creating a gallery, but a discussion." And not just a discussion on art, but also a discussion on unused areas in the urban environment. Rather than leaving the decisions to city planners, Pavlacky argues for a bottom-up approach. He believes a community's members should turn its abandoned areas into venues that serve common interests. The Appendix Project Space is Pavlacky's vision realized.

The current installations by fiber artist Maggie Casey were built specifically to the dimensions of the Appendix garage. Tied between rafters, walls, and floor, "Drawing Study" occupies half of the project space and is composed of fishing line, wire, electrical tape, frayed yarn, and neon ribbons. Casey intended this larger installation to look like a storm. Suggesting no particular vantage point, string ladders stand within tangles of overlapping lines. "The ladders represent hope in a moment of confusion," Casey explains, and the sporadic lines mimic the way "things happen all at once."

The most intriguing piece of the show, "Drywall Tapestry," is embedded directly into a wall. Anchoring wire and string protrusions with mounds of joint compound (drywall mud), Casey pressed wire mesh into the drying surface, recreating the texture you'd find on the backside of a wall patch. The globs and slopes of textured drywall mud appear waterlogged, suggesting landscapes of corrosion. From a side view, the wires and strings rise from the wall like empty mountain ranges, each skeletal ridge a window into the next.

Maggie Casey's installation will be up through May 16. Info on future Appendix workshops and openings can be found at appendixspace.com.