Temporal: Semiotics of Time and Place curatorial statement

“Exterior space gives way to the total vacuity of time. Time as a concrete aspect of mind mixed with things is attenuated into ever-greater distances, that leave one fixed in a certain spot. Reality dissolves into leaden and incessant lattices of solid diminution. An effacement of the country and city abolishes space, but establishes enormous mental distances. What the artist seeks is coherence and order – not “truth,” correct statements, or proofs. He seeks the fiction that reality will sooner or later imitate.” – Robert Smithson, “A Museum of Language in the Vicinity of Art: Spectral Suburbs,” Art International, 1968.

All of our actions occur in space. Life itself evolves through time. Temporal is a re-examination of the relationship between human sensation, our environment, and the synthetic world, a re-evaluation of our perceptions of reality as we read the physical world around us. Temporal investigates the conventional role of gallery space and the lexicon of work found within that is specific to the gallery. Temporal is a three-part pursuit, juxtaposing the image of time, the object of time, and the space of time.

A picture often is an intellectual reference to something other than the paper or canvas on which it is printed or painted. Likewise, a photograph is a metaphor serving as portal from the place of the gallery to space experienced somewhere else. The photographic image is a product of a stop in time, a place or moment frozen. To appreciate the metaphor between this syntactical construct and our perception of specific location is to realize fluidity of time.

“The biological metaphor has its origin in the temporal order, yet certain artists have ‘detemporalized’ certain organic properties, and transformed them into solid objects that contain ideas of time”1. An object enters the gallery embedded with the corrosion and essence of time, thus containing an “idea of time”. Temporal examines the art object as artifact. The art object installed becomes a place in itself, made active in spatial negotiation. Rejecting the autonomy and commodification of the modern art object, temporal installation produces a non-objective, yet specifically phenomenological, place in the gallery. It is also by material metaphor that an object may represent another site or place in a semiotic iconic method different from the image.

Through metaphor and signifier, or the haptic and phenomenological, Temporal evokes both the presence and absence of time in place. Does time have a texture or a mood? Where is time? Can time be altered, encased, slowed, or hastened? Is time an abstract construct used to measure, or does it exist sovereign from human perception? Light of the sun shadowed dark, turning light again, marks one day; and thus becomes the quintessence of time. Following this logic can the sightless, unable to know light different from dark, know time? Time is a symbolic language agreed upon, specific to place and perception?

Temporal references site as historical archive, explores the space of contemporary places, and simultaneously looks toward our changing landscape or cityscape. Temporal uncovers layers of lived history, the visceral aesthetic of a place, and the eroding imprint of people and natural forces on these places. Temporal explores our perceptions and experiences of place: the place we are now, places we have been, could go to in the future, and the places inhabited by others before. Time re-examined uncovers layered sediment of human experience in the strata of every location. Temporal examines the physical and psychological factors that constitute an understanding of place.

Temporal explores the universal, timeless and time-filled language of art, and examines the relationship between art, site, time and the power of display.

– Joshua Ray Smith, curator

1 Robert Smithson, “Quasi-Infinities and the Waning of Space”, Art Magazine 1966.