Tenterhooks: Liminal Space
By Steve Bennett | November 5, 2020
This composite image, which I created a year ago, was meant to depict the concept of being suspended in liminal space. The crosswalk is the ultimate symbol of liminality. When you’re in a crosswalk, you’re nowhere, really, trying to get from one block to another. In “Liminal Space,” there is no discernible destination, no “here.”
Steve Bennett, “Liminal Space” New York City 2019
Today, I feel that there is no “here,” either, in terms of where we go as a nation so divided, how we survive a raging pandemic, and how we foster understanding when everyone is so angry.
I believe that “Liminal Space” has the same quality of disharmony and confusion as the experimental film Koyaanisqatsi: Life Out of Balance. It conveys a sense of nervous energy, of a mind about to dissolve into irreconcilable shards, of a world on the verge of exploding. It is an image of what our country is going through right now.
Copyright © 2020 Steve Bennett
Steve Bennett is a Cambridge, Massachusetts-based visual artist. He began taking photographs more than 40 years ago, in the age of film, and transitioned to digital photography in the late 90s. Today, in addition to taking and making traditional street, macro, and landscape photographs, he creates photo-based abstract composites designed to take viewers on fanciful flights of the imagination through virtual realms. His work has been displayed in numerous juried exhibitions, and at Google’s Kendall Square, Cambridge offices as well as various technology, biotech, and financial service companies in the Boston area.
These are definitely surreal times! Your photo captures that feeling perfectly! It makes me think of the Beatles song “Nowhere Man”! Well done!
Thank you so much for the kind comment, Sharon. And yes, “Nowhere Man!”