In-Betweens 中间帧

How much of an ordinary day do we keep?

What stays with us are the big days. We photograph the wedding and the graduation, frame them, tell them back to ourselves for years. What falls between one big day and the next slips away unwitnessed: the afternoon at the carousel, the walk home, the person who sat on a bench and waited until we had finished playing. These are the hours where most of a life is actually spent.

Animation has a name for both. The frames that carry the action are called key frames. Every frame that gets from one key frame to the next is called an "in-between", drawn by someone whose name appears nowhere on the finished film. Pino Cao studied animation at Sheridan. Before that came five years of civil engineering at Waterloo, learning to draw a blueprint precisely enough that a stranger could raise a tower from the sheet alone.

In-Betweens marks Cao's first solo exhibition, and both trainings are in every painting. The blue goes down first, one a blueprint is printed in. Over that comes the drafting: dimension lines, leader arcs, a title block in the lower corner. An arc measures the angle of a molar. Leaders run to the canopy of a carousel.

A blueprint is drawn so that a building can be put up from it, and its figures record what a building has: a floor height, a span, a clearance. What Cao measures is a memory, and a memory has none of those, so the notation comes out as marks nobody can read.

Here is the tenderness of the exhibition. Some of these paintings carry no title but a date, and Cao left them unexplained on purpose, so that whoever stands in front of them can bring their own: Everyone has days like that, days that will not take a name and can only be placed by when they happened.

We are glad to offer Cao her first room, and glad you came to stand in it. Look for what she measured and could not count: the afternoon that went unphotographed, the person who waited for you, and the day you only recognize once it has gone.

"Home is where you can't go back" is one work made of many separate pieces, in various sizes. Every so often we take it apart and put it back together in a new arrangement.

Two people will be engaged with Cao at the opening reception on Saturday, September 19, and two more on Saturday, October 3. Both run 2:30 to 4:30 PM. There is nothing to prepare and the rules are simple. You turn up and play with a puzzle. We will be documenting it.

Write to us if you would like to participate.