A white violin, outlined by the soft glow of neon; decorative molding kissed by the cylindrical ridges of a hot-rod oil filter; black shag carpet pin-stripes a well-worn floor, concealing pennies spread ritualistically underneath; salvaged milk-glass bulbs shaped into clocks, and clocks that trace time backwards.

In Michael Bala’s solo exhibition, Neon Violin, temporality takes a circular path through familiar objects and ritual fantasy. Bala’s work interrogates disappearing acts present within interior spaces. His arrangements provoke a strong sense of familiarity in parallel with a loss, an unbridged gap between the intimately familiar and the unknown. Bala constructs his sculptures from a collection of salvaged fragments of tools, components, and fixtures, born of industrial production and artisan craft, now defunct and displaced from their origin. Each of these objects once served a particular purpose that Bala has inverted, reinvented, or left otherwise undetermined through a kind…