Riffin on Art: Between Place and Time in the Vacant Spaces

The Work

Venetia Dale

Between: Styrofoam Inserts 

Pewter   

The Riff

Vacant spaces made to accommodate the everyday are remade, reformed again in durable metal to recall yesterday’s everyday, and to influence tomorrow’s. Between has physical, also predetermined, forms that are intended to protect the vacant spaces, and the work finds itself superimposed on vacant spaces as they once existed in the world, where there exist boxes intended to protect the forms themselves.

Now, they're exposed and vulnerable.

Space conspires with light, memory, and familiar textures to cast the illusion of lightweight transience; and the vacant spaces, the nothings-but-light-and-shadow, think they're safe inside their forms. Just as the first piece of everyday determined the shape of the vacant spaces, the last piece of everyday to separate the forms and vacate the spaces we shaped, shapes us even before we decided to either abuse the forms and toss them aside, or to keep the vacant spaces safe, in case the everyday needs them again. But I suppose it depends on the tenant, and whether we're willing (able?) to reshape the spaces to accommodate some(one)thing different. Lightweight transience notwithstanding.

     The Series            Tributaries

  The Exhibit             Next After The First In Order, Place And Time

      The Place            Keeler Galleries inside the main building at one of my new haunts, the Metal Museum