Time x Place

The Garage | Charlottesville, VA | 2017

Located at The Garage - a space adjacent to Charlottesville's historic Emancipation Park - I first started thinking about this show during my residency at Cumbria University (in the U.K.), over the summer. This being my first time out of the country, I was excited to compare what I understood as normal to a culture that was foreign to me. 

I had been researching what is called genesis amnesia, the idea that at a certain point our collective memory loses the origins to something fundamental to our way of life or thinking (examples such as why we eat almonds, celebrate certain holidays, built roads exactly where they are, or work certain jobs). The knowledge exists, but how do we remember it and talk about it? I was hoping to find parallels between the structures maintaining the way of life enjoyed in England to the way things are done here in the United States.

When I retuned home I was suddenly aware of how rapidly everything was and was not changing: The invisible push of profit accelerating our still-debated evolution. Forestalled conversations about our environmental responsibilities with inactive - but comfortable - optimism, while private corporations take advantage of a political-social-economic-judicail system that caters to the wealthy (a problem very connected to glacial pace of voting and health care reform). The only presented escape from life-taking poverty another social machine that feeds upon the impoverished. As governing rhetoric pushed for increased divisions about what it means to be an American; or maybe what it means to be a human [what it means to be alive], white nationalists marched through Charlottesville in demonstration.

This show was presented as a multidisciplinary investigation of time (as a material), and a mediation on our relationship to static objects.

A review of the show @ tete-ahh-tete.net