Staying In The Same Place, Just Staying Out of Time
Isha Naguiat and Miguel Puyat
Blanc Gallery, 6 December 2021

To think about time is to also think about presence, in all its desirous and emergent palpability. It is to recognize that the
most tangible, temporal signposts are those that connote life and signal vitality, e.g., the period when a person (or persons)
entered and retreated from your awareness. At the same time, the company we keep also serve as affirmations of our own
existence. However, opportunities for mutual presencing have withered in the past years. With socializations at the
minimum (or relegated to the virtual), long-held notions about selves are necessarily recalibrated. In “Staying In The Same
Place, Just Staying Out of Time”, Isha Naguiat and Miguel Puyat ruminate on this prolonged retreat that has jolted us into
a different texture of time and space.

There is a playful sense of materiality exemplified here, as the artists grow fabric mushrooms and embroidered buds.
Sewing and embroidery are traditionally protracted processes, taking you out of time in its relentless repetitions. Again and
again, in small movements, the threads are manipulated. They travel in directed patterns of emergence and disappearance,
as if deliberating on the technics of artistic practice during suspended temporalities. In transmuting cloth and yarn into
spore-bearing fungi and embryonic shoots, the artists bring attention to wildly multifarious timescales. To prolonged
silences and sudden germinations. To an irreverence towards human-scale periodization. Which is to say that in this exhibit,
disclosure and concealment serve as running threads of conceptual and material engagement.

From these signposts, a cyclical structuration emerges. What has sprouted must soon wither, and what has lurked in the
dark will have to burst forth. But in so doing, alchemical reactions must take place. From the odds and ends of our
quotidian days, and in the shadow of a pandemic, what can be cultivated? Here then is a kind of clustering, a striving, an
adapting. Here then is the difficult and necessary recognition of the ways in which transformations must take place.

– JC Rosette