The Momentary: The Theme of Time
THE MOMENTARY
Associate Member Exhibition
curated by Georgina Lewis + Lior Neiger
August 4–29, 2021
Sunday August 29th is the last day to witness Fountain Street’s Associate Artists show, "The Momentary," in-person. Co-curator Georgina Lewis explores the theme of time in the work on view. If you missed the show you can take a self guided 360º tour of “The Momentary” available until the end of October 2021 here.
Near the beginning of Chris Marker’s film La Jetée there's an image of motion frozen in time. Not the famous one of the woman’s face but a still of a young boy’s legs as he stands, feet resting on the lower rungs of a railing, staring out over the runways of Paris’ Orly airport. It’s an image redolent with both information and mystery and, like the film as a whole, a reminder of the plasticity of time.
Time functions varyingly in the work of The Momentary. “I lie in wait for those occasional days when fog rolls in from Boston Harbor and enshrouds the Old Northern Avenue Bridge--all in the effort to capture a new photographic portrait of this rusting iron structure” writes Jeffrey Heyne, 2 of whose Bridge photographs are included in the show. Bridge with Orange and Phthalo Blue 8:24am is one of them and you can sense the specificity of the moment by the title.
Jeffrey Heyne, Bridge with Orange and Phthalo Blue 8:24am, 2017, archival pigment prints face mounted to plexiglass, on Dibond panel
There’s a specificity to Dalvin Byron’s Empire, too; the literal frozeness of the transitory state of melting ice cubes, but as with Heyne’s photographs the momentary feels as if it could also stretch forever, a second becoming an eternity: “Since March 2020, the work I created allowed me to reflect on the slow passage of time during months of quarantine.” writes Byron, “The work became an escape from the turmoil of the world.”
Dalvin Byron, Empire, 2020-2021, oil on panel
Catherine Picard-Gibbs writes about “elongated time”, and her painting Waiting with a Cup of Coffee seems almost to collapse, or maybe its challenge, time: “I realized moments are not always perceived in the same way. I discovered there are times when moments seem to slow down and the passage of time becomes palpable.
Catherine Picard-Gibbs, Waiting with a Cup of Coffee, oil on board
Our prompt to the artists of the show included the question “Do you record instants or periods of longer duration and do you situate your work in the present or perhaps another temporal frame?”
Nan Feldman’s paintings of birds read like film stills, albeit painterly ones, with a definite sense of before and after, as well as that brief captured moment. But they also seem to exist outside of time. Birds mean freedom to Nan and perhaps that’s what playing with time gets you.
Nan Feldman, A Strange Song, 2021, oil painting on canvas
Seeing and learning about the work has been a wonderful and thought provoking experience. Thanks artists!