Slippage: Thoughts on Liminal Space in Contemporary Art

“When you’re looking at two things, don’t look at them, look between them.” –John Baldessari Note: This is a curatorial statement written in conjunction with an exhibition I curated title <a href="https://601artspace.org/" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">“Slippage.”</a> If you find yourself in New York City this Summer, you are invited to visit! This exhibition explores what it means to function in a liminal space between two states of being and highlights moments of “slippage,” the liminal experience occurring at the juncture where disparate elements meet. After researching liminality as seen in literature, psychoanalysis, and my own observations during a global pandemic, I came to see liminality not as a discomfort to avoid, but as a generative site. Gaston Bachelard wrote in the The Poetics of Space that ‘imagination augments the values of reality;” art is that augmentation brought to life, and as viewers we can occasionally see the lines between the world as it has existed and how an artist shapes and re-presents it to us. The five organizing themes for Slippage are Home & Privacy, Physical Distance, Nature’s Adaptation, Between Materials, and Moments of Action. These topics were identified through conversations with the artists, when possible, and my own research. They are not fixed categories, and I encourage visitors to rearrange works in their imagination to create new groupings from what they see. <a href="https://medium.com/art-adjacent/slippage-thoughts-on-liminal-space-in-contemporary-art-68d68d46ae75">Visit Now</a>