'Not Every Place You Fit In Is Where You Belong' by Theodore Darst & Collin Leitch at King's Leap, New York

Not Every Place You Fit In Is Where You Belong is a collaborative exhibition by Theodore Darst and Collin Leitch at King’s Leap about not breaking into spiritual prison. Featuring a two-channel video and a constellation of prints and sculpture, the two artists contemplate the history, agency, and surface tension embedded in the compositing of media.

The centerpiece of the exhibition is All Manner of Things Shall Be Well, a vertical video framed across two HD televisions. Darst and Leitch’s reorientation of the picture reveals a middle-ground, where their content moves just as freely across the monitors as it does between their array of influences and strategies. The two work modularly, using the cloud as their studio to send each other their own distinctive markings–Leitch’s home-spun motion-graphics and rephotographed game environments are joined with the poetic shards and 3D worldbuilding of Darst’s practice. It is through the sum of these parts that the distinction of their ‘special effects’ breaks down and begins to resemble the haze of a spiritual genre blockbuster. Their theology is not tied to a monotheistic pursuit of medium, technique or workflow, but rather finds something in the existential conundrum of production itself, becoming an indexical footprint of the state of moving images.

This cross pollination of Leitch and Darst, where images pollute the monitors like clouds of smoke, kicks up the dust of trans-media histories and distorts our perceptual relationships to them. Their work eschews both the sacredness of experimental cinema and the capital sealed within Hollywood filmmaking. Instead, the two work to subsume and push through these modes of production so that we can move freely in our first person role-player, watching as the window shatters.