In the current issue of there., Loretta Clodfelter’s Here/There series of photographs plays with the concepts of the titular terms and, in so doing, foregrounds the question of the border between here and there. Her photographs add a dimension to this investigation that the mere presence of large letters reading HERE and THERE cannot. Seen on site, the installation of the term THERE seems paradoxical; someone must have stood in that place and erected those letters and, to that person, the place so labeled must have been “here”. The photographs, however, freeze and emphasize the gaze of the uninvolved viewer: to this individual, HERE is never here, as s/he must always be somewhere else in order to look at the word.

Finally, the location of these words on the Oakland/Berkeley border further emphasizes the line between here and there, though the word-sculptures themselves illuminate the constructed and subjective nature of that division. One, too, is led to speculate as to where one side of the border is always here and the other always there and, if so, what factors lead to that labeling. (This aspect of the project could be seen as the art reading the audience rather than the audience reading the art.)