“Because I know that time is time and place is always and only place and what is actual is actual only for one time and only for one place, I rejoice that things are as they are and I renounce the blessed faces and renounce the voice because I cannot hope to turn again.”
― T.S. Eliot, Ash Wednesday
In his poem, Eliot rejects the idea that time and space are interlinked. However, in our exhibition “remains of the day,” we intend to see photography as the medium that provides evidence and traces, binding time and space together in its symbolic representation and indexical mediation.
Either the silent passage of people, water stains on the ground, or the delayed rays of a sinking sun, Xinyu sees his photographs not only as imprints of what has happened but also as the process when the transients turn into the eternal. In Xinyu’s photographic works, the perspective constantly shifts around the peripheries. Through his visual transformation, the mechanical time is disrupted in the process of recognizing “now,” thus forming a unique presence in time and space that negates temporality.
In Epistolary Anthology, photographs made of a single tree canopy along a prairie walking path hold space for free verse that meanders through moments of reflection and nostalgia. Entering a collaborative practice of momentary, focused explorations, Adam and Charlotte point towards the universal through life’s fragmented moments, but never fully arriving to a conclusion. The interest that fuels this collaborative work lies in constructing new wholes from gathered parts, seeking not to answer, but merely play with the question of what is unspoken.
In Pearl Road, Colton looks to the landscapes of his youth in Montana and Idaho to explore the metaphoric relationship between land and body from a personal queer perspective. Colton’s photographs confront the marks left in the landscape both psychologically and physically to subvert ideas around manifest destiny and resource extraction in the Western United States where solitude and escape coexist with heightened visibility.
