You Are The Space Between by Joe Park incorporates art historical references and invites viewers to complete the imagery Park alludes to through his mark-making process. These paintings bring together several aspects of Park’s previous work, including explorations of representation and abstraction and multidimensional perspectives, using a process-based application of paint to describe the spaces between matter that we don’t see.

In these works, Park depicts particles tracing arcs through space, colliding, and eventually coming together to form wavy grids that create a figuration of the space between objects and people. In exploring this inter-object space, Park creates a liminal reality that simultaneously obscures and defines images, allowing them to appear and then fade depending on how the viewer looks at the painting. Without a single focal point, the images, or non-images, in each painting resolve depending on how the viewer focuses on the work, creating a sort of “myopic impressionism” of non-immediate imagery.

Park’s abstract paintings are known for their color and surface, made of thousands of layered, painted lines that vibrate and expand, recalling natural phenomena. Park often references historical movements in his work, ranging from the Op Art of Bridget Riley, the Northwest mysticism of Mark Tobey and Morris Graves to the transcendental art-making ethos of Agnes Martin.