In his exhibition Interstitial Volume, Seattle-based artist Henry Jackson-Spieker presents a series of installations that uniquely integrate themselves into the studio’s architecture. This sequence of works explores visitors’ physical and philosophical perceptions of space, inquiring how individualizing factors such as race, cultural upbringing, history, and education can impact the way we understand and move through the world. By connecting these themes of power and perception, Jackon-Spieker creates works that induce a somatic response, a physical uneasiness or unbalancing. These concepts are materialized through three site-specific sculptural installations that trisect MadArt Studio, modifying how viewers navigate and engage with their physical environment. 

Interstitial Volume is an extension of Jackson-Spieker’s interest and research into how our eyes process data provided by light to interpret our surroundings. He aims to push the limits of this research by incorporating applied light, colored thread, and monofilament within the studio’s architecture to create liminal spaces that are visually and somatically disorientating. In one instance, he activates an area that is otherwise physically inaccessible to the viewer, building into the ceiling’s interior light wells to create an illusory void that visually distorts the physical boundaries of the space. The other two installations use strategically positioned reflective and patterned materials, which rely more directly on a body’s actual presence amid the work to demarcate the shifting positive and negative volumes. These works emphasize the artist’s conceptual explorations by intentionally steering the viewer through transitional interstices that require an acute awareness of the body in relation to his sculptural forms.

Through Interstitial Volume, Jackson-Spieker creates visual blind spots and distortions that he hopes act as metaphor for the things we don’t see or question within our everyday surroundings. This engages viewers by forcing them to confront how they move through and utilize the environment, indirectly posing the question: For what and whom is this space intended? Centered around belonging, these questions illuminate how the act of altering movement through the studio can in turn encourage new forms of engagement, discovery, and self-reflection from the community.