Serena Lin Bush

Serena Bush, a Houston video artist, stated “my work is all about the in-between places. I am trying to locate a universal experience. The events I depict are common enough but are monumental choices; monumental, but not recognized as such because they are so mundane. The quick flash of fear is one experience that we all share. I am trying to isolate that kind of moment and widen the experience by slowing it down.”

A pause is a suspension of time, a lingering spurred by hesitation or uncertainty. Like a set of parentheses, it interjects a space in the midst of an experience already in progress, making way for a necessary breath, a brief aside, or a momentary drift. The elastic space a pause inhabits shapes itself around the activity that happens there.

Serena Bush’s video installations melded the physical and virtual worlds. For her, the camera is a conduit for the reinterpretation of real-time images. Viewers enter into her mises-en-scene literally rather than figuratively: She created four works for the installation titled pause: lingering doubt, underpinnings, queue and tangent.

pause was concerned with the interplay between shaped space and feeling. Each work magnified the emotional architecture of these pauses, investigating the layered spaces in which we experience them: temporally, within our bodies; and externally, in the world.