Between Spaces
To be between spaces indicates an interval, a pause or a break, before a new beginning. Space
can relate to both place and time, time is the soul of space as space is the body of time. When
we read between the lines – it is space that gives us a moment to ponder hidden meanings and
possibilities. It is the breaks between the beats in Count Basie’s One O’Clock Jump that creates
its atmosphere of excitement. The spaces are filled with potential. The void of space is full of
mystery, dark matter and dark energies, that permeate all of existence. When we pay attention
to the between spaces we may find a union between existence and possibility,
between being and becoming.
The title of this exhibition refers to both the physical/geographical and the metaphysical
understandings of the term between spaces. Time and space are seamless yet we create
imaginary boundaries where none exist. The between spaces may be a border-link between
conceptual boundaries of the spatial and psychic encounter of self and the unknown other. It
may refer to the meeting between self and place, the aura of the intimate known or the
mystery of the unfamiliar. Our spiritual geography is of deep importance here as we become
aware of our boundaries, our ideas of self may shift as we interact both within and without the
world.
Within Katherine Rutecki’s works there is an uneasy tension between expansion and
contraction; as if that which restricts might also liberate. The space in Katherine Rutecki’s small
bronze, Box of Birds, is one of crushing confinement. In Katherine’s own words the piece presents
“…a hypertrophy of birds, an amassing multitude of bodies, held forcibly and condensed down into
a cube by unknown forces. The compressed, sunken, hard, inescapable feeling of heartache,
that fills and bears down, and pulls from the inside, suspended within your chest, big and hard
and heavy. The bodies of the birds swell out and the cosmic antimatter crush it back in, the
heart has no room and each beat is strained and pained. The birds are silent, their sounds
muted by the nothingness which condemns them.” In Cloud Extension, the restriction in Box of
Birds finds its apotheosis as the birds have been set free, becoming a long white cloud of glass.
Jon Witzky’s five large oil paintings presented in this exhibition seem to express the essence of
place as refracted through memory. They are inspired by the emotional
and psychological resonance of space and time – the character of place. In these works, the
spaces between become important, as both the positive and negative shapes come alive – to
paraphrase Rilke; it is the moving space between that allows the trees to grow. These works
may be thought of as existing in the liminal space between the mysterious and the familiar, the
twilight of the magic hour or the moment between waking and sleep.
Jon Witzky and Katherine Rutecki, Carbondale, Illinois, 2018
