Ordinarily, when an artist arranges for a series of portraits and one of the models dies, they might consider it a bad omen. But for Susie J. Lee, death was part of the process—and perhaps the ultimate point—to her Still Lives video series. That work comprises 13 half-hour videos made of residents at Washington Care Seattle, a nursing home in the Rainier Valley. All the videos are on permanent display, open to the public, but only one segment—Exposure, featuring a woman named Annie—will be screened in in her first solo museum show. Working with her sitters meant respecting their limited energy, with a certain amount of deference and delay. “It was on their timeline, not my timeline,” says Lee—appropriate, since her art has much to do with temporality and duration. Time and its progression link Lee’s two pieces at the Frye, since her reconstructed Rain Shower—“version 2.0,” she calls it—is a recreation of a 2007 installation at the old Lawrimore space in the ID. Five years later at the Frye, Lee explains, the LED lights will cast down “little droplets of light, kind of like raindrops … like a rain shower is remembering someone.” BRIAN MILLER

Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Fridays-Sundays, 11 a.m.-5 p.m.; Thursdays, 11 a.m.-7 p.m. Starts: Feb. 18. Continues through April 15, 2012