The Space Between: Then and Now

Reflections on time, memory, and Tamara Scronce’s The Space Between at the Main Gallery, Truckee Meadows Community College

By Candace Garlock

The tumbleweeds caught me first.

Visiting Tamara Scronce’s The Space Between at TMCC in the Main Gallery, I found myself drawn to the organic presence of the tumbleweeds juxtaposed among the clean, geometric forms of the screen, clocks, and framed constellation. Their tangled branches seemed out of place, as though a little of the Nevada landscape had crossed the threshold and gathered on the gallery floor. I noticed the contrast before I understood why it held me: straight edges versus unruly growth, deliberate arrangements and forms I associated with suspended wind.

Then the memories came.

Tamara Scronce, My Future is Behind Me, Northern Nevada tumbleweeds, paint, 2026, installation at Truckee Meadows Community College, Main Gallery

The landscape I carry

Growing up in Nevada, tumbleweeds were an everyday occurrence. They moved across open ground, caught along fences, and rolled onto the long stretches of highway between Elko and Reno. Sometimes passing vehicles cut them down. Other times, an enormous tumbleweed would dance into the road just ahead of us, turning an otherwise uneventful stretch of driving into a near miss.

I remember that brief uncertainty. Which way would it go? Would it keep moving or suddenly change direction? Something so familiar, so mundane, could still surprise us.

In the gallery, that sense of movement returned even though the tumbleweeds were still. I looked at their branches and thought about the wind. I thought about miles of highway and the experience of watching the road ahead. What I remembered was not one particular journey but many journeys folded together, the repeated passage between places becoming a landscape inside me.

When the familiar asks us to stop

On the highway, a tumbleweed usually entered my attention because it was moving—or because it was in the way. Here, I could stop and look. The pale, branching forms invited a kind of attention I rarely gave them outside. My eye followed a stem into the tangle, lost it, and began again.

Their organic presence felt especially vivid beside the exhibition’s measured forms. I kept moving between the two: the irregular branches and the clean edges, the sense of something gathered from a landscape and something carefully constructed. That contrast made me aware of my own habits of looking. I had recognized the tumbleweeds immediately, but recognition was only the beginning.

I wondered how often familiarity keeps me from seeing. Something can belong so completely to the background of a life that it becomes almost invisible. Then a change in setting brings it forward. What once passed by the car window becomes something worth standing beside.

Tamara Scronce, The Space Between, exhibition photos taken by Candace Garlock L-R: My Future is Behind Me, Northern Nevada tumbleweeds, paint; Measured Light: Between Rising and Setting, daylight lamp fixtures, wood, fabric; Still, It Moves, wood, pendulum clock movements, time; Ursa Major and Polaris: One Day at a Time, LED lamps, masonite, wood frame.

The time an object holds

Time felt present throughout my visit, though not only as something that could be counted. The wooden boxes and their suspended, pendulum-like forms made me think about intervals and waiting. I found myself anticipating movement, noticing the space beneath each box and the shadows falling along the wall.

The tumbleweeds drew me toward a less orderly experience of time. My memories did not arrive by year or follow the sequence of a trip. They arrived through a shape. One encounter in the present opened onto a collection of older experiences, some distinct and others little more than a feeling.

I was aware of standing in the gallery while also remembering the road. Neither experience replaced the other. For a little while, they existed together.

The space between

I began to understand the exhibition’s title through that overlap. For me, the space between became the distance between an ordinary experience and the moment it returns with unexpected weight. Between passing something without much thought and stopping, years later, to consider it.

That is part of what interests me about memory. I cannot always explain why one detail stays when so much else falls away. Looking at these forms, I felt how strongly an unremarkable part of the landscape had become connected to my sense of growing up in Nevada.

Still moving

As I reflect on the visit, I keep returning to the difference between seeing a tumbleweed from a moving car and seeing one in the gallery. On the road, there was rarely time to do more than notice it and respond. In the gallery, I could linger. I could look at what was in front of me and make room for what it brought back.

The tumbleweeds had not changed my memories so much as given me access to them. Their stillness allowed me to remember their movement, and to recognize a piece of my own history.

This exhibition is marking time and in a way it is telling us not to take it for granted.