Betwixt & Between

November 11, 2010 – January 22, 2011
Artspace, New Haven, CT

Betwixt & Between is a group exhibition of contemporary short videos conceived around playfully charging the ordinary domestic landscape with existential content and psychological slippages. Informed by the conceptual strategies of Surrealism, and echoing their simple, direct methods for constructing dream-like experiences, the videos in Betwixt & Between speak to notions of authority, alienation, and desire embedded in everyday objects and occurrences.

Frequently accessing emotional states of childhood, such as wonderment and an attraction to the forbidden, the artists in Betwixt & Between create works that are haunting and unexpected. Mundane settings and items are re-purposed here: tweaked in surprising ways to create short glimpses into worlds which are uncertain and fantastic. No longer a singular linear measurement, time becomes a malleable material that is stretched, condensed, and fractured to create doubt in the viewer.

The title of the exhibition references Albert Camus’ 1937 collection of short writings, L’Envers et l’Endroit (Betwixt and Between). Camus’ texts describe the joys and complexities of liminality, of being in an ambiguous, indeterminate space, and emphasize the romantic paradox of human existence that “there can be no love of life without despair of life.” The artists’ works assembled in Betwixt & Between share an unexpected beauty and reveal a common aspiration: to question the moral ambiguity of the ordinary using surprising and often humorous means.

Artists include: Terry Fox, Nadia Hironaka, Alex Hubbard, Takeshi Murata, Jeff Ostergren, Delphine Reist, Hiraki Sawa, Carrie Schneider, and Tom Thayer.

Exhibition guide: Artspace_B&B pamphlet