The Space Between

The Space Between 

A two person show by Eric Araujo and John Felix Arnold

Aquarius Project Space

June 10th-June 30th

Opening Reception June 11th, 4-8pm

11-16 Wyckoff Ave, Ridgewood, Queens, NY, 11385

For many artists, the journey of reckoning with the idea of existence, and the infinite, from what we perceive as a finite mortality, has led to a life-long practice. The daunting endeavor of confronting impactful chapters that transform and often define us, leaves a residue of trauma, and a chance for renewal. The search to cultivate peace within lived experience, to find support and growth in the unknown, emerges in unique and connective ways amongst groups of peers in artmaking. To step towards the veiled horizon while confronting the demons of the past and present, can birth an incessant need to create as a means to heal. Here, the cyclical nature of realization and acceptance that leads to catharsis that opens space for further questions, is the practice. 

Eric Araujo and John Felix Arnold evidence a lifelong bond as artists and friends, which is seen in the dialogue between their evolving bodies of work. Through different approaches, materials, and visual languages they confront similar core questions and issues in their artmaking. Their new exhibition, The Space Between presented at the Aquarius Project Space creates a multidisciplinary spatial dialogue exploring this idea of “the practice” that signifies the middle road within duality as we as humans work with acceptance and suppression, anger and humility, death and becoming, division and embrace.Araujo, through a combination of sculpture, painting, and drawing, deals with the human condition, ego, and self evolution while contending with issues around the loss of his father to addiction and depression, and the ways in which that experience, albeit 25 years later still shapes him. Arnold’s work, rooted in drawing based mixed media and sculptural installation, centers in his mother’s journey through Alzheimer’s, expanding into contemplations on history, spirituality, and his own path of transformation in relation.