Cross Streets in My Mind
What happens when place, memory, and motion collide in a single moment?
In Cross Streets in My Mind, Bethany Altschwager invites us into a vibrant collision of time and texture—an imagined cartography composed of lived experiences. This solo digital collage exhibition, on view from July 1 through September 1, 2025, at www.exhibizone.com/cross-street-in-my-mind-exhibition, is a striking exploration of the psychological and emotional landscapes layered beneath our everyday paths.
Drawn from her Street Layers series, each work in this collection is built from fragments of graffiti, textures, and city maps collected across New York neighborhoods—from East Village alleyways to distant corners of Gramercy. These visual elements are woven together digitally to form fictional intersections—titles that suggest real locations, but ultimately point inward, toward an inner terrain that cannot be found on any street sign.
These images began as a means of grounding—Bethany started capturing these fleeting urban marks in 2015, during a demanding period of professional transformation while earning her creative arts therapy credentials. Constantly in motion between multiple jobs and neighborhoods, she began collaging her photos at day’s end, turning a chaotic routine into a contemplative act of visual journaling.
Through energetic painterly overlays, luminous color fields, and layered decay, Bethany constructs liminal spaces where the temporary becomes timeless. Crumbling walls become brushstrokes. Rust and stickers sing alongside fluorescent streaks. In one moment, you see the echo of a street corner. In the next, you fall into a dreamscape of memory and sensation. The images break apart, then reform, mirroring the human journey of holding on, letting go, and evolving through rupture.
Each single-edition canvas in this show is both personal artifact and public offering. Together, they create a city that is at once familiar and entirely new—an emotional topography mapped through resilience, transformation, and the beauty of the ephemeral.
Bethany Altschwager is not only an artist but a licensed creative arts therapist whose practice integrates art, healing, and identity. With over 800 works in her growing archive, her Street Layers series continues to expand as a living, breathing narrative of her urban wanderings and inner worlds.
In Cross Streets in My Mind, we are invited to navigate not just Bethany’s memories, but to discover echoes of our own stories hidden in every layered trace.
