but not always is a collaborative body of work between artists Alec Kaus and Rana Young.

In an era marked by division, exhaustion, and unease, we speak in a shared voice, working through indirection and circling what resists articulation. Meaning is traced through contradiction rather than resolution. The images linger where emotional scripts falter, where familiarity no longer guarantees safety, and where disappointment becomes so predictable it borders on the absurd. Much of this unfolds within domestic space, treated not as refuge but as a stage, where tenderness and menace rehearse their proximity and the everyday tips almost imperceptibly into the surreal.

The images—some found, some made—are bound by a restrained palette of reds, blues, and stark black-and-white. Moving between intimacy and estrangement, they occupy a visual terrain shaped by interiors, thresholds, and quiet rituals, where joy edges toward dread and absurdity brushes against despair. What operates here is not humor as release, but the comic as tension, a sustained misalignment that keeps the tragic and the mundane inseparable and allows meaning to emerge through friction rather than clarity.

Collaboration is both our method and our ethic. The work records an ongoing conversation that is messy, vulnerable, and sustaining, resisting the isolation of singular authorship and affirming accountability when certainty fails.

but not always remains where laughter curdles, intimacy unsettles, and joy and dread press against one another.