NYC Art Review

Walking into Tay Byers’s debut solo exhibition The Between feels less like entering a gallery and more like stumbling into a deeply private reckoning. For a first exhibition, this body of work carries a gravity and cohesion that suggests not the tentative gestures of a beginner, but the confident pulse of someone who already understands the emotional architecture of image, object, and silence.

After our last article on Tay Byers, we promised to revisit her work after its highly anticipated public debut, and we’re happy to report this exhibition lives up to that excitement and then some. What was once an intriguing spark has now erupted into a fully realized creative language. It’s thrilling, and a little humbling, to witness an artist so early in their career already working at this level of thematic and emotional precision.

Upon entry, each visitor was asked to don a black sheer mourning shroud, a ritualistic gesture that immediately blurred the line between observer and participant. The effect was profound. The gallery, filled with slow-moving figures veiled in translucent black, became a living procession of ghosts. As the audience, we ourselves became part of the installation, embodying the very grief, remembrance, and reckoning that Byers’s work confronts. What might have been a detached viewing experience instead became an act of shared vulnerability; in that moment, everyone present carried a piece of the exhibition’s mourning.

The gallery itself unfolded as a landscape of confrontation and tenderness. Across the walls, photographs hung like cinematic stills from a story we’ve half‐forgotten but feel in our bones. In “I Was Never Going To Reach You, Was I?”, Byers runs on a treadmill, reaching desperately toward a disembodied hand, with motion, futility, and yearning all collapsing into a single blurred gesture. The overhead light flattens the scene into a sterile anonymity, yet the emotional current is fierce; this is the exhaustion of trying to reach someone who is already gone, or perhaps of running toward a past that refuses to hold still.

In “Relentless Awareness”, Death himself looms in a bathroom, scythe in hand, confronting Byers slumped on the toilet, creating an image at once absurd, tragic, and deeply human. Byers transforms the most mundane space imaginable into a theatre for existential negotiation. Her weary gaze toward her visitor says more about resignation than fear; it’s a portrait of exhaustion in conversation with inevitability.

Deeper into the Photographic Work

The series of self-portrait photos in this collection reveals the conceptual heart of the exhibition. The images collapse performance into confession: the artist as protagonist and witness, body as site of negotiation between distance and disclosure. The photograph titles themselves read like interrogations: “Can You Ever Forgive Me?”, “Heavy Is The Head”, “Self-Inflicted”, “Cold Comfort”, “Just Move On.” Each image is not simply a moment captured but a statement pulled from the undefined space between life and death, action and stasis, knowing and unknowing.

Visually, the photographs are spare yet rich. The compositions often frame Byers as the subject in states of suspension or movement toward absence; the lighting and space feel clinical yet emotionally charged. There is a consistency of mood through dust-toned palettes, strong contrasts, and an emphasis on empty space or the void. This restraint is crucial: it allows the conceptual weight of the work to breathe rather than overwhelm. As a debut photographer exploring installation and performance alongside the still image, Byers shows remarkable self-control and clarity of vision.

What might have been melodrama in less capable hands becomes, in Byers’s lens, startlingly intimate. There’s humor here, too, and a sly acknowledgment that absurdity often walks hand in hand with despair.

Installations and Live Performance Elements

The surrounding installations anchor these images in the physical realm. A dusty funeral outfit seated beside two clocks, one frozen and one ticking, becomes a quiet study in how time fractures around loss. A chained bed, draped with floating tags that read “just get up,” cuts sharply into the platitudes of healing culture. A table of life’s joyful relics (souvenirs, trinkets, fragments of laughter) sits under a suspended figure of death, suggesting that even our happiest memories are shadowed by the awareness of their impermanence. And then there’s the culminating memorial: an urn overflowing with ashes that spill across the floor, surrounded by mirrors angled back at the viewer. It’s an unflinching gesture, forcing confrontation. Death’s aftermath, reflected endlessly in our own faces.

A live violinist’s mournful tones wove through the air, while an actor cloaked as the Grim Reaper wandered the space, occasionally following a specific visitor or standing just close enough to unsettle. Combined with the audience’s own funereal attire, these choices dissolved the boundaries between art, ritual, and community. The exhibition became an ecosystem of presence with each sound, movement, and breath feeding the gravity of the moment.

Poetry

Complementing the visuals are Byers’s poems, pinned delicately near each scene. The artist’s decision to display the poems directly on the found materials on which they were handwritten (the back of an opened envelope, a torn corner of scrap paper) conveys an element of exposed humanity, a sense of uprising emotion pouring out in the midst of everyday life. Despite their crude mediums, the poems are not decorative additions but vital organs of the work. In “The Feeling,” nostalgia ripens into grief as she mourns the fading echo of belonging. “The Unknowing” wrestles with the violence of awareness, how knowledge can feel like a curse we must learn to bear. “Too Late” is raw confession, unguarded and trembling; “The Push” reads like an autopsy of ambition and self-punishment; and “Between Me & God” distills years of pain into two defiant words. Finally, “The Guard” closes the cycle, acknowledging the armor built in trauma and the paradox of loving and loathing one’s own defense mechanisms.

Experienced together, these poems and installations form a symphonic experience of emotional realism. Byers’s work sits somewhere between visual art, performance, photography, and poetry, speaking in a cross-disciplinary language that feels remarkably self-assured for a debut.

The Final Room

The exhibition concludes with a spatial and conceptual inversion. Before leaving, we were asked to enter, one at a time, a small private room. Inside: a mirror inscribed with the question “What is it time to forgive yourself for?” Markers and blank papers invited response. Over the course of the exhibition, this quiet act became a living archive, a communal artwork that evolved in real time, layered with the confessions, regrets, and small mercies of the evening’s attendees as each participant added their paper to the mirror. In this final gesture, Byers reorients the exhibition’s emotional economy. The compassion directed toward the artist and her imagery is redirected inward, transforming empathy into self-reflection.

This closing installation, arguably the exhibition’s most potent moment, functions as both release and return. It reframes grief not as terminal but circulatory, extending beyond the walls of the gallery into the lives of its audience. In a striking act of emotional choreography, Byers brings the work to rest in grace rather than despair.

As A Collection

What’s most compelling in The Between is its precision. Byers avoids the easy dramatics of catharsis, opting instead for control. Control of image, of tone, of emotional affect. Her debut announces an artist already fluent in the language of emotional architecture: disciplined, conceptually articulate, and exacting in her attention to how art feels in the body.

If this exhibition is the beginning of Tay Byers’s fine arts journey, it’s a beginning of uncommon promise. There’s an auteur’s sensibility emerging here, one that fuses image, text, performance, space, and community into an experience both personal and universal. Byers is not merely documenting emotion; she’s constructing the language through which emotion might be seen.

We often talk about artists “finding their voice” when critiquing early work, but Tay Byers seems to have arrived with hers already echoing through the room. And it is our formal opinion that it’s a voice worth listening to- haunting, resolute, and achingly human.