Some Space Between is an exhibition of art works resulting from an investigation of the city as an organism, and its changing landscape, as longtime urban nuclei dissolve into expansion, outerbelts, and megamalls. As technology advances and communication more frequently takes place via television, wireless systems, and the internet, the lifeblood of the urban area thins. The small, close downtown communities of the past are giving way to the vast distances of suburbia. People no longer meet each other on the street or at the local market. The sense of familiarity or neighborhood is absent, as the paths we travel daily consist of broader and more distant highways. The city itself expands, like a living, growing entity. Over time and with development, "progress" can be mapped onto Columbus like the concentric circles of a ripple on water. What are the by-products of this natural progression? What happens to the abandoned places? The spaces between? What are the voids in the human experience, that may come as a surprise in the face of much comfort, convenience and advancement?

Fourteen OSU graduate students from four departments have undertaken a multifaceted, multi-media project under the guidance of visiting faculty member, Berlin artist, Franz John. Conceptually, the components of the class have included issues of place, social and political questions, ways of seeing and understanding the world, and perception in a broad sense. The group consisted of individuals with backgrounds in many areas of art and new technologies, like computer graphics, web-building, photography, alternative cameras, video, projection, kinetic sculpture and installation. They all met the challenge, and applied their expertise and personal interests to the concept at hand. This class has introduced students to another level of their role as artists, as an interface, using technology to extend perception beyond the ordinary. International artist Franz John has challenged the conventions of sculpture and photography, and has stretched the role of technology, making artwork that communicates on many levels. He has incorporated many mediums into his work, from the camera obscura, to a hand-held photocopier, to webcams, video, CD-Roms, installation, and much in between. Skylab is an independent exhibition space on the top floor of the old brick building at 57 East Gay Street in downtown Columbus. It is a "raw space," with concrete floors, brick walls, and exposed pipe and ductwork, located in the heart of Columbus' urban center, and is a perfect place for the artists to express their ideas about the center, the expansion and the space between.

Ellen Grevey

The goal of Some Space Between was to understand the city of Columbus as a self-organizing, breathing machine or an unfinished artificial organism. Like the condensation of an accelerating mechanism, suburbs grow unfinished, anarchistic and wild around a more or less designed core. The graduate students in my seminar were challenged to find traces, structures and textures of this condensation which embodied this machinelike breathing. In order to get artistic access to this idea, they were encouraged to think beyond what is commonly understood as urban sprawl. They were asked to observe and create with a vision more science-fiction than literal. I proposed that different members of the group work on topics reflecting past, present and future. It is commonly thought that longtime inhabitants of a place only regularly perceive 60 or 70 percent of the details of their environment. Upon my arrival, I viewed Columbus through the eyes of a visitor, a foreigner, whose mechanisms of perception were working overtime.

I digested the new information and considered the possibilities for site-specific artwork. I charged the students with the task of examining their surroundings with a new perspective, perhaps to work less like artists and more like a detectives. There were no requirements as to media or technique, but as the participants came from a variety of different departments such as Photography, Art & Technology, Painting, and Sculpture, I encouraged them to focus on a collaborative project, to explore new techniques and to test new materials. I suggested to unite the students´ works into a group effort that would culminate in an exhibition or a catalog or both. Downtown Columbus' Skylab Gallery offered us the challenging opportunity of a public exhibition of Some Space Between. Situated in an old brick building in the nucleus of the city, it was ideal space to bring the project into fruition. Thanks to the OSU Department of Art and the College of the Arts, without whose support the exhibition and resulting catalog would not have been possible.

Franz John

One of the strengths of the Department of Art is our long-standing visiting artist program. It is distinguished not by record numbers of visitors nor, necessarily, by high profiles on the national and international art scene. We do benefit from a having many artists come to talk and make studio visits. But on the whole, our visiting artists are visiting faculty, and most come to teach for a full quarter. The result is a level of engagement with students, and faculty, that is impossible in one- or two-day encounters. We are all greatly enriched by this extended contact with artists from around the country and abroad of widely differing backgrounds and perspectives. When we began putting our heads together to think of potential visiting artists in Sculpture for the winter of 2001, Franz John came immediately to mind. Franz and I met in the summer of 1996 at the Headlands Center for the Arts in San Francisco where we both had residencies. I was impressed then by his immersion in the history of the Marin Headlands and his exploration of the remains of bunkers dotted throughout the hills of the former military base just north of the Golden Gate Bridge. Franz spent his days walking the site, bringing to light and artfully capturing what had become largely invisible. I visited him in Berlin in the summer of 2000 and saw even more evidence of his persistent, discerning eye for the forgotten, the overlooked, the obscure elements-physical, historical, and social-that are, he shows us, of fundamental importance to a site. His conceptual approach and his unorthodox use of simple and sophisticated technologies struck me as an excellent fit for our program and the interests of many current students.

Franz and I spoke at length about how he might approach teaching at The Ohio State University. I could not have imagined in those early conversations what form his graduate level studio seminar would take. In hindsight, Some Space Between is a natural outcome of his presence and a nexus of graduate students from many areas of the department. As the seminar took shape, Franz and the students began to see the possibilities for it to culminate in an exhibition and catalog. Their ambitions for the course did not surprise me. But that does not lessen my pleasure in and gratitude for the results of their ten weeks together in Columbus, Ohio.

Malcolm Cochran
Sculpture Area Coordinator
Ohio State University