Jan Dunning -THE SPACE BETWEEN- at The Crypt, St Pancras Church

Jan Dunning
-THE SPACE BETWEEN-
at The Crypt, St Pancras Church

2009.6.5 - 21

Jan Dunning, Untitled (Ballroom), 2008, Colour pin-hole photograph, 50 x 47 cm
Press Release

The Space Between brings together a group of nine established and newly established artists (whose work ranges from video to performance and sculpture), many of whom are represented in major collections, including the Saatchi, V&A and Wellcome Trust's. The show explores the ideas that surround our common experience of 'liminality', of existing in 'a space between' places, ideas, thoughts and emotions. The venue itself, with its tombstones and relics of those who have 'crossed over', is perfect for a discussion of the theme, occupying as it does the middle ground between states, the ephemeral and the permanent, life and death.

The current Zeitgeist dictates that we can be anyone or anything if only we try hard enough, or are good enough, and so increasingly we find ourselves in a 'space between', somewhere between 'being' and 'becoming'. It's a place of transformation and possibility, rich with longing, melancholy and fantasy. Only here are we able to stop and contemplate - but never entirely grasp - the state of flux that characterizes our lives.

This sense of being poised on some kind of threshold is all the more topical because of the precariousness of the age in which we live. As the artist Doris Salcedo has said, 'Precariousness produces an image in which the nature of the work is never entirely present.'
The artists' diverse practices of sculpture, video, photography, installation and performance each tap into different aspects of the theme:

Group show with artists Annie Cattrell, Amanda Couch, Richard Ducker, Jan Dunning,
Joy Gerrard, Kate MccGwire, Marilène Oliver, Kate Street, Esther Teichmann

©2009 nca | nichido contemporary art. All Rights Reserved.