‘Dance While the World Burns’ at The Crucible Gallery

For “Dance While the World Burns,” now at The Crucible Gallery, artist Janice Liuson-Young poses a disturbingly simple yet haunting question: “Are you ok?” It is a query directed not just at the viewer, but at a society grappling with a fractured sense of reality.

Through the processes of gestural abstraction, and destruction and reconstruction through collage, Liuson-Young explores the tension between the visceral human “gesture” and the distant, often distorted reframing of human life through the screens that continue to impact and transform contemporary human experience.

At the heart of Liuson-Young’s work is the painterly gesture—a traditional signifier of human presence, emotion and agency. By cutting her initial paintings into segments and reassembling them as collages—a process that injects a layer of observational distance into an otherwise poetic act of human mark-making—she subjects raw human expression to a process of interrogation.

The method mirrors our reality perceived through digital interfaces: smartphone cameras cropping images of protest or body cam fragments of a fatal encounter. The “cutting” becomes a metaphor for the relativity of human perception and how media, bias and distance reconfigure our understanding of events until the original intent is obscured by infinite layers of edits.

In an interview, she draws a chilling parallel between her artistic process and the tragic, conflicting reports surrounding the deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minnesota. She notes how the same event—captured on video and witnessed by many—can be spun into two diametrically opposed narratives: one of “domestic terrorism” and another of “neighborly protection.”