Hyde Cabinet #12:
Everyday In-Between

Ralph Gibson’s photograph offers a tantalizing reminder of what it is like to be in a transition space, anticipating a new stage. Transition spaces guide us from one place to the next. A hallway, for example, is not designed for loitering. Instead, we enter it to travel from one room to another. When we step into a car, that is never the final destination. The car’s job is to take us to another location. These physical spaces of transition guide us from one place to another; our actions can also work to take us to new places, physical or intangible.

Due to COVID-19, we have been missing out on many of these physical transition spaces. As we’ve traveled outside less frequently, we’ve lacked passages from home to work, these in-between steps. With so much of our work and socializing taking place online, we are on our own one moment, and in the work zone via Zoom the next. We are in class yet still in the same room where we relax. We are forced to live without the transitions, jumping directly between these different mindsets while staying in the same place. And if that weren’t enough, we’ve been missing out on the non-physical transitions as well. With recent uncertainty of how graduation would be celebrated, Skidmore seniors, including myself, were worried we would not be able to mark the transition from our college lives to starting a new independence in a traditional way.