92Y Commissions BETWEEN DARKNESS & LIGHT To Mark One Year Of Lockdown

In late February and early March 2021, three artists commissioned by New York's 92nd Street Y came together to create the short film, BETWEEN DARKNESS & LIGHT. Shantell Martin, visual artist, and Shamel Pitts | TRIBE, 92Y Harkness Dance Center artist in residence, created original work in response to a poem by Paul Tran, winner of 92Y's Discovery Poetry prize.

92Y shares the short film online on March 12, 2021, one year from the day on which the COVID-19 pandemic closed the institution's doors, as a tribute to the resilience and determination of our community in New York and around the world, and as a promise of better days to come.

Shantell Martin describes this project saying, "Everyone is working separately yet together. Although it wasn't possible for us to collaborate in person, the project was extremely intimate. Listening to Paul Tran's poem, I had a vision of someone being an outsider, meditating on their words in space, and being inspired by them. I wanted to convey the idea - in very simple means - of being transported from a dark place into the light, of being illuminated by this poem and these ideas."

Paul Tran comments, "The handprint is one of the earliest examples of self-representation. I can hardly imagine what it was like, thousands and thousands of years ago, to seek shelter in a cave; to find others had been there; to see the animals they painted; and then to join the animals by leaving their handprint on the wall. Maybe the word for it is hope. Maybe it's realizing I'm not alone. I'm here, still."

And Shamel Pitts | TRIBE describes his contribution this way: "I wanted to explore the tension between dualities: the thread between us that was once tight or tightened, which becomes loosened and lullabied through shared loss and void, memories, nostalgia, homage, remembrance."

Watch here.

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