Times Long Past

In previous months, time seemed to have transmuted. Forced indoors, we forego the frenzy of recent past: the hustle of daily tasks, relentless buzz of conversations in diners, heady spasms of morning commutes, or the gnashing frustrations in standstill traffic. We remained busy, yet our hoverings were curtailed into a few square feet, or in the miles between home and the nearest market or grocery. But after a year of lockdowns, what does it mean to recall last week, last month, or the second quarter of a year? What does it mean to remember everything that has gone before?

The group exhibition Times Long Past probes into the interior psyches of waiting and distance. In as much as to remember had often meant to recall remote events in our past and the ability to close these distances in one bound. As we wait (for what exactly? the end of lockdowns, the return to the frenzy?), this turn to interiority appears to be a crucial element of the times. Reminiscence the fundamental order of the day. Here, the flow of time is manifested in the coalescence of things, in their slow or drastic transfigurations— the life cycle of plants, the cutting of hair, the mute stoicism of structures, or the surfacing of memories. It is of waiting tinged with longing, while bearing witness to change as the only thing that endures.

Indeed, when was the last time that of our hours felt like this? Like a slow, prolonged drip. Sticky and thick, oozing at the edges. Nothing like a pandemic to render the days opaque, a dense haze, delirium, deliration. We seem stuck in the viscosity of long-remembered summers, yet without the carefree insouciance. Uncertainty hovers but has lost its edge, instead it is a dull, consistent pounding in our heads. Nothing is permanent and everything can change. Slowly it seems, and with much hesitation. A long breath and then the fall.

– JC Rosette