To Stand Where Distance Neither Grows Nor Shrinks: JJ Jarin

Meddling with and Mudding the Middle

Sometimes, in the middle of an ordinary moment, we become acutely aware: I am here, now, doing exactly what I am doing. And rather than returning to autopilot or rushing toward what comes next, we linger, letting the moment unfold without demanding resolution. We don’t always have to move forward. Sometimes, where we are is enough.

What if the middle is neither waiting room nor detour, neither prelude nor postponement, but a place where life is already taking place?

In To Stand Where Distance Neither Grows Nor Shrinks, JJ Jarin begins with a disorienting glitch: autopilot cuts out, and we find ourselves both living a moment and watching it unfold from a distance. Through the patient unthreading of experience, Jarin draws our attention to the light, shadows, textures, and spaces that routine renders invisible. Liminality becomes not a holding area for resolution, but a place worth inhabiting.

A hammer strikes a nail, interrupting the very act it should complete. Jarin makes mincemeat of a moment, breaking an ordinary gesture into its constituent parts, yet dissection is not destruction. Nearby, three wood-framed panels mimic windows, offering a view while denying entry, supplying a tangible divide. We are drawn toward what lies before us, made conscious of the distance that keeps us apart.

Corridors, façades, steps, and rooms become subjects rather than routes to somewhere else. Where architecture directs us from point A to point B, Jarin asks us to consider passage as place. A bloom carries the duration of its waiting via cosmic configurations; a twisting dracaena pursues sunlight without abandoning its roots. Scaffolding, mesh, rope, concrete blocks, and sandbags borrow the language of construction while hinting at comfort.

Bent grass bears the impression of a foot; a glare catches the eye, then dissolves. The heightened awareness that unsettled the familiar begins to subside. Nothing is neatly resolved, nor does it need to be. The environment remains much as it was, but our relation to it has shifted. The exit is soft, the return quiet. What began as hyperawareness settles into stillness.

Across the exhibition, the middle acquires matter and measure. This attention to duration lends particular resonance to Jarin’s solo exhibition after three years. He never stopped making art; the work continued beyond the spotlight. Against the familiar script of departure, development, and triumphant, often fully publicized, arrival, he offers a quieter and more accurate account of artistic life: a practice can persist without constantly announcing its progress.

To stand where distance neither grows nor shrinks is to suspend the usual measures of progress and arrival. Jarin neither resolves the middle nor leaves it empty. He meddles with it, muddies it, gives it matter and measure. This interval becomes an event in itself, not because it leads somewhere, but because we are already here, in this moment, where the artist invited us to be.

Kaye O’Yek