The Space Between Us

Navigating the Space Between Us

Space that has been seized upon by the imagination cannot remain indifferent space… It has been lived in, not in its positivity, but with all the partiality of the imagination.

--Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space

In conceiving the exhibition The Space Between Us, we considered artists whose work explored a range of spatial circumstances inspired by familiar interiors and the surrounding architecture*.  Our choices gravitated toward the idiosyncratic and the obsessive, always with the idea that if we, as co-curators, engaged with the works in unexpected ways, viewers would too.  

Jesse Bercowetz and Matt Bua, Dawn Clements, Richard Garrison, Mark Greenwold, Oliver Michaels, Adia Millett, Fabien Rigobert, and Mary Temple penetrate the complexities of perception by focusing their attention--and ours--on details and events that define inhabited space. Through a combination of acute observation, persistent research, and elaborate fabrication, their work reveals that the space between us is rarely what it first appears.

Each time we mount a show at the University Art Museum we grapple with its voluminous exhibition space. For The Space Between Us, we developed a construct that would confound and play against the rational, controlled aspects of the museum’s Modernist architecture.  We came to think of our open, two-floor expanse as one vast set--a fictional architecture in which we might explore ways that individual works could speak to each other and also maintain their singular integrity.  We hope that our most obvious decision--to leave as much space between the works as possible-- serves to visually and physically underscore the exhibition’s title.

Most significantly, we looked at how each artist’s personal navigation of space contributed to a larger spatial awareness. The spaces they explore are our spaces--felt spaces filled with the messy, frightening, hopeful, poignant, banal contingencies that surround contemporary life. By examining what lies behind and beneath the surface of things, they remind us that no space is devoid of content, history, or possibility.

Janet Riker and Corinna Ripps Schaming, co-curators
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*The Space Between Us is part of the University-wide initiative Architecture at Albany: A Year Long Exploration of the Built Environment at the University at Albany and Its Surrounding Community.