carmen menza


BETWEEN

It has been an endless winter since you left

Color bleaches from this world
a prism in reverse
refracting the warmth of your hand
to a distant star

Helios, in the eye of heaven
inhaling the last apricity
left on my cheeks

The bricks of your foundation are still here
clay reborn, absorbs
the restless shifting of my mind

Journal in my hands
empty pages
I am falling behind

All winter I waited
for the words that would not come
the ones I kept swallowing

Dust motes swirl in a solitary beam of light
spinning gold out of the hushed air
I sit, anchored
in this dimming room
watching the hours turn amber
without me

The sun will dip
the golden square will fade
as twilight pours its blue across the floor
leaving me stranded
in this thickening haze
my hand still reaching through the dark

Even snow learns to erase itself
the warmth of the sun returns
I am not behind

I am between



There is a space that opens when someone leaves your life. It has no name in ordinary language. It is not quite grief, and not quite clarity. It is a threshold: a doorway you are standing in, with one room behind you and another you cannot yet see. BETWEEN is an exhibition about the space inside that doorway.

I conceived this show during a period of transition, when I often felt the memory of three women in my life who were deeply meaningful to me. The women I loved were gone, and the person I had been alongside them was going too. Identity is partly built from the people who witness us. When they leave, we lose more than their company. We lose the version of ourselves that only existed in their presence. What remains is a liminal state, a pause that connects two different points but belongs fully to neither.

Thresholds are strange places. They are not destinations, but spaces of suspension. I wanted to give that suspended condition a physical presence. Throughout the exhibition, the work lives in half-states, caught between hard edges and soft light, saturation and fade. Works built with obscured layers, so that the viewer must hold two images at once: what is there and what is no longer. Empty spaces are as deliberate as filled ones. Absence is a material in its own right.

Time behaves differently for me now. It feels slower. This is the ache of the in-between, the reflex to reach for someone who is no longer within reach. And yet BETWEEN is not a portrait of despair. Thresholds are also places of becoming. The fog of transition performs quiet work on us. It is where we are rearranged.

I do not offer a way out of the fog. I do not think there is a shortcut, and I distrust any promise of one. What I can offer is company within it. This exhibition is for anyone standing at a threshold of their own, between who they were and who they are becoming.

You are not behind.

You are between.




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