Jasmine Best (Greensboro, NC) | October 2021

Toe Walker is an exercise in body awareness and personal appreciation. It encourages audiences to consider how they take up space in the world and how their body automatically navigates. The artist naturally walks on the balls of her feet. A trait that is hereditary but was also encouraged in girl children as benign a femme trait. Walking on your toes one is used to moving through the world quietly and minimally. This was interrupted by the very old and loud floors of Elsewhere. Jasmine decided to fight their instinct to walk on the quietest parts of the floor and actively seek out where the floor makes the most noise.

Toe Walker is made up of bright, balls of feet only, painted footprints that directly correlate to how loud the floor is where the most footprints reside. Toe Walker invites audiences to play with how much space they want to take up with their movement and how much attention they allow themselves to draw to their movement in Elsewhere.

Craig Deppen Auge (Kansas City, MO) | Exchange (Kansas City) | August 2021

This series of 20 sculptures and interventions incorporating textile scraps, collage, metal grid form, and other various collection materials can be viewed as For the most part, the artist has committed to using scraps and parts “as found” with no additional manipulation, just a focus on composition, constructed intuitively. This series of works is the most closely connected to the artist’s current body of work outside of the museum. Within this setting, these are abstract poems honoring all who have drifted, and will drift, through Elsewhere; from previous residents all the way back to the boarding house days. In that broader sense, these may speak to our independent, yet collective, journey through this life, on this planet, and the “getting lost” elsewhere along the way. Other questions emerge, as the artist continues to think about the grid as the symbol of existing social structures, or more broadly, and the fabric as ourselves and how we navigate these systems. Then we can ask: are we dancing with the grid or fighting the grid? Are we caught in the grid or escaping the grid? The placement of these pieces and proximity to each other also begins to suggest they carry individual personalities, and are themselves transient beings, resting mostly in the Alone Zone and drifting down the hallway.