PRESS RELEASE
WATER DIXON: The Space Between Us
Oct 14 – Nov 1, 2019
WATER DIXON | The Space Between Us | 14 Oct - 1 Nov 2019
Tell me a story.
In this century and moment, of mania,
Tell me a story.
Make it a story of great distances, and starlight.
The name of the story will be Time,
But you must not pronounce its name.
Tell me a story of deep delight.
- Robert Penn Warren
Caitlin Warther and Wendy Dixon are an artist duo who collaborate on site-specific installations, sculptures, films, and photography. “We are,” state the artists, “united through our intellectual curiosities, and have been asking the same questions, from different angles, before tackling them together.” This includes the big questions, such as how an artwork can renew experiences of human connection.
Water Dixon’s work is distinctive, in that it offers viewers an opportunity to gaze within, to reflect on their perceptions of time, identity and spirit. To contemplate, and to return over and over again to looking, thinking, feeling and reconnecting. They hope that through their work they can create in the viewers an embodied learning of self and soul.
Water Dixon’s new body of work, The Space Between Us, is inspired by the question: what determines the quality of the relational space between two things, beings or ideas?
A Pleasure to Meet You is a large-scale mirror and light sculpture that acts as an otherworldly portal through which the viewer can consider their present self. The artists explain that “when you step into the mirrored booth, what you will be confronted with is three reflections of your image staring back at you – but only one of them, the non-reversed image, is your true reflection.” According to the artists, you will, for the first time, see yourself as others see you.
The Dual Doors, a site-specific work, is a set of two light-based sculptures placed specifically at opposing ends of a historical tunnel in the V&A Waterfront. At first glance, each sculpture appears as the opposite colour of the other, and the space between them a wash of contrasting coloured light. After walking through the first door, though, the viewer comes to understand that the two are both the same.
The mirrored wall sculptures, Self-Portraits and In Between, offer the viewer a reflection of themselves through topographical, interstellar and elemental provocations. They are offered as a form of self-care, a vision of the self that is open-ended, philosophical, spiritual and freeing. Each mirrored work places the viewer in a position where they have the opportunity to delight in seeing themselves differently.
Water Dixon’s The Space Between Us explores the space between two things that is often made up of tension and feeling, which determines the quality of that relational space. This inquiry has led the artists to create constructs in light and space that firmly place the viewer in the position of conscious subject.
