Winding

Alee Garibay Solo Exhibit

“Which was cause and which effect, which future and which past? 

…In this acausal world, scientists are helpless. Their predictions become postdictions. Their equations become justifications, their logic, illogic. Scientists turn reckless and mutter like gamblers who cannot stop betting. Scientists are buffoons not because they’re rational but because the cosmos is irrational. Or perhaps it is not because the cosmos is irrational but because they are rational. Who can say which, in an acausal world?

In this world, artists are joyous. Unpredictability is the life of their paintings, their music, their novels. They delight in events not forecasted, happenings without explanation, retrospective.

Most people have learned to live in the moment. The argument goes that if the past has uncertain effect on the present, there is no need to dwell on the past. And if the present has little effect on the future, present actions need not be weighed for their consequence. Rather, each act is an island in time, to be judged on its own. 

… It is a world of impulse. It is a world of sincerity. It is a world in which every word spoken speaks just to that moment, every glance has only one meaning, each touch has no past or no future, each kiss is a kiss of immediacy.”

-Alan Lightman, Einstein’s Dreams

This passage from Alan Lightman’s Einstein’s Dreams articulates my thoughts and feeling during the recent Covid-19 lockdown. Einstein’s Dreams are poetic vignettes about the different ideas on the nature of time based on Einstein’s theories.

This exhibit is a rumination on time (or timelessness). Winding refers to the winding of the clock (forward or back) and also to the winding nature of (our experience of) time. The series features close-ups of family, friends (old and new), the people close to me, myself (self-portrait), personal objects, suspended fragments, scribbled thoughts; traces of existence, moments of intimacy, all captured suspended, paused, so I can sift and run my hands, my eyes, my mind through them in slow motion.

While the isolation makes one long for intimacy in the comfort of relations (past or future), it also gave time to reflect on or break reflected images of oneself and thoughts and of others, others’ (as alluded to the  mirror-like shards).

This break in identifying with a certain identity can be jarring for some but it was refreshing for me, like pressing the reset button. It was a chance to unwind and release attachment to certain modes of doing, thinking and being. Like going back to a being a(n almost) blank slate. 

Alee