Todd Carpenter’s newest series “In the Spaces Between” brings us a new way of seeing the world around us. Bringing new meaning to the phrase “can’t see the forest for the trees”, Carpenter recognizes the tendency to consider a subject for only its material parts. We categorize, organize, and reduce things into their utility, or disutility in seconds. Snap judgements define how we see and interpret the world, and as a result, what we see becomes less and less of what really is, and is replaced by a shallow projection. Our affinity for labels and the search for belonging within only a few superficial restrictive categories leave many feeling isolated and alone, inhibiting a broader view of what surrounds us. Carpenter reminds us through the quiet resilience of a single beam of light, piercing steadily through the arms of a tree, to appreciate a subject’s surroundings as well as the subject itself. Suggestions of buildings through dense fog, the impression of trees given by the inversion of positive and negative space, radiant bursts of solar flares, all contribute to the sensation of physical place. This ethereal, simultaneous feeling of isolation and belonging transcends any individual identity. What remains is the the feeling of the combined greater parts, and our place within it. Traces of light contrasting against sweeping skylines and sprawling cityscapes encourage the viewer to see the image as a whole. The intangibility of being somewhere and nowhere at the same time is sometimes lost in the trivialities of everyday life, but is found in Carpenter’s work, in the spaces between. Each landscape and urban environment captures the fleeting essence of light, the passing of time, and a sublime revelation of consciousness. We are defined by our interactions with space, time, darkness, and light. Carpenter’s monochromatic work presents viewers with a world where we are children of shadow living in a world of light and dark. “One must decode the patterns of light and dark to find it, and there too one might encounter oneself, recalling beyond recollections to a time before humans possessed words to name trees but knew the shelter of their shade. It is the same with any landscape: we perceive a landscape differently than the details that comprise it. The landscape is perceived as a whole, as an arrangement of entities without identities, and most significantly the landscape is a place of which we are a part. To perceive the landscape is to perceive space, which is not the perception of things but of where things are relative to ourselves.” — Todd Carpenter