“I’m interested in how an object / image can change from one space to another. How layers of images and space can create a new space, that the viewer experiences in person. Space changes both with external variations (light, weather, persons, actions, whatever larger structure it is within) and also its perception as affected by internal variables, moods, emotions, thoughts. For me nothing is fixed about this very open concept of ‘space’ and I like to work within a discourse where these variations are allowed, nurtured and emphasized.”

Space in itself doesn’t exist. It is rather an abstract description of our environment in regards to culture, geography, politics, economy or language. Speaking about space mostly refers to the physical space defined by two opposing planes. Such a space possesses a volume that can be described as a hollow or solid volume, as an opposition of a positive and negative form. The space does define itself through “inside” and “outside”. Solid, it does not only carry an imprint of its interior but also an imprint of the surrounding space. As much as this formation describes a space within space, my artworks are interwoven into their surroundings. They are imprints of the movement within the society and culture by which they are socialized.

The space I am interested in is not static, material, topographically or physically defined – it is not a container but much more synchronous, overlapping and interleaved. We move in a world of interconnected structures. Space as a network is by far not unfamiliar to us – as in the form of the internet or as the shrinking geographical space of in the age of hyper-mobility. […] [In painting, a] simultaneity of past and future is formed, that appears in front or almost fades away in the subtext. Whereas photography and film plays with the passing, length and measurement of time, painting allows a synchronization and layering of spatial and temporal levels on one single canvas, toppling the linear (narrative) structure we are used to from film and photography.

[…]“But, after all, the aim of art is to create space – space that Is not compromised by decoration or illustration, space within which the subjects of painting can live.” Frank Stella

I was reading these essays by Renee Gladman, and I came across these passages about the space(s) of narrative and the distinctions between Poetic Time vs. Time of the “Object World.” 

“Recently, I had found that to talk about something that was in essence everything was simply too exhausting, and that the only way around it was to talk about the question of the thing rather than the thing itself, since in the end, it would become both. “Narrative—” I went on with my talk, “Was anybody still interested? I didn’t want to open my eyes to it. I hadn’t wanted to think about narrative at the same time that I was conscious of my body lying in the object world. It was a problem of space similar to what Martha and I were discussing yesterday: Was it possible to say that something was gathering outside of a thing with the intention of meeting something else when this something else was the larger space in which that first thing existed? Could I talk about narrative as I was operating within it?” 

“I wanted to tell her that the problem of poetic time was not a fiction, as I’d been, for years, calling it. Fiction did not concern itself with problems of time. If there was a problem inside a fiction—a problem of any nature other than what’s happening inside the plot—then the whole thing would swell and small holes would form across the surface and the swellings would become as large as mountains while the holes would fill with water and become river valleys and soon we would be so far from the surface of the water that we’d recognize the picture of the mountains and valleys as a part of a geological map and recognize ourselves standing in an object world much larger than the object world in which we’d been lying when we began this essay.” 

She dives more into explanation of Poetic Time and Language Space in this interview:

LI: What should you be doing with your writing?

RG: If I were a really good drawer I would give up writing and just make beautiful line drawings, or at least for a while that would suffice, but I don’t draw well enough to abandon writing. Sometimes I go around and talk about the sentence and prose, and for a while I was really stuck on how thoughts exist in a preverbal way. I was thinking about how in our minds we have many things going on simultaneously, as images, half words, gestures, partial marks, and from that multiplicity we go into the single line of articulation, of expression. I kept trying to point back to that threshold moment, that translation or becoming. The linguistic selection process, what you decide to privilege, is fascinating to me, but it’s hard to know what to say about it. It makes writing a very interesting space. Writing is not a map, but something that comes after mapping.

…

LI: Why prose?

RG: I came up through poetry, but I am a sentence writer. I don’t know if it’s so much creating narratives as narrative space. I’m interested in time and experience and the sound of telling a story as opposed to the story itself. I have a love and deep interest in fiction, especially fiction in translation, so I teach that. But often in my workshops now I’ll bring in texts that are hybrid, cross-genre works. It’s useful as a way to get students to take more notice of language. I have students read poetry and then enter it from a sentence space.

LI: So the poem also contains the sentence?

RG: You can’t avoid narrative in any kind of language space. And poetry is interested in experience; time is there, and the day. There are places where it pushes toward documentation and begins to remind me of what you might do in prose. Maybe not fiction. But in prose, how you might build sentences around an abstraction or feeling rather than plot points. I think it can only benefit literature for fiction writers to employ various degrees of compression in their approach to narrative.

LI: At the risk of going backward, what’s the difference between fiction and prose?

RG: Fiction is interested in a certain kind of unfolding or sequence of events. Time is more intact in fiction. Prose, I think, introduces the element of the awareness of yourself in language as you are unfolding things in time and allowing yourself to be distracted or interrupted, allowing yourself to question the difficulty of what you’re doing and be stalled, not to move. I want more fiction to do this, because it changes the way we read and understand story. With fiction that repairs all doubt and interruption and experiment by being fluid, coherent; what we expect doesn’t leave much room for me as a reader. But I think the more you talk about these categories, their distinctions, the quicker they break down. Ultimately, what I want is for there to be a blur over everything.

eesalala:

A broader meaning of public space or place includes also places where everybody can come if they pay, like a café, train, ormovie theater. A shop is an example of what is intermediate between the two meanings: everybody can enter and look around without obligation to buy, but activities unrelated to the purpose of the shop are not unlimitedly permitted.

The halls and streets (including skyways) in a shopping center may be declared a public place and may be open when the shops are closed. Similarly for halls, railway platforms and waiting rooms of public transport; sometimes a travelling ticket is required. A public library is a public place. A rest stop or truck stop is a public space.

For these semi-public spaces stricter rules may apply than outside, e.g. regarding dress code, trading, begging, advertising,propaganda, riding rollerskates, skateboards, a Segway, etc.