PASSING TIME

Shaun Gladwell

ORGANIZERS Cecile and Ezra Zilkha Gallery, Wesleyan Univesity, Middletown, Connecticut
January 27 – March 4, 2011

VENUES
Robert E. Peeler Art Center, De Pauw University, Greencastle, Indiana
March 19 – May 10, 2011

Salina Art Center, Salina, Kansas
August 17-October 19, 2011

Bakalar and Paine Galleries, MassArt, Boston, Massachusetts
January 22-March 2, 2012

DESCRIPTION The multiple and converging meanings of the phrase “passing time”—spending time, time to die—are explored in the evocative imagery of recent art by international artists in video, photography, sculpture and works on paper. Much of the work is, appropriately, time-based. Some artists turn to sport, some to dance, and others music; some refer to nature and its rhythms to explore concepts of time—short term, long term and terminating. Others frankly partner with time itself in their making of art.

Time is a concept that philosophers and physicists ponder. Time provides a framework that orders, measures and defines. We spend time, we waste it, we keep it; time flies, it drags. It is elastic in its perception—long when we are young, gaining momentum as we age. Determinate time, a specific lifetime, “lived time” in the words of the Swiss philosopher and natural scientist Jean Piaget (1896-1980), exists within a continuum that is defined by one’s religion or world view. In ancient Greek there are terms to describe kinds of time: aion (duration), cronos (sequence or chronology), and kairos (immediacy). This exhibition explores the relationship between the time of our life and the time of the eons, kairos to aion.

ARTISTS Matthew Buckingham (USA), Jonathan Callan (United Kingdom), Luis Camnitzer (USA), Rineke Dijkstra (The Netherlands), Ken Fandell (USA), Shaun Gladwell (Australia), Felix Gonzalez-Torres (USA), Leandro Katz (Argentina), Katrin Korfmann (The Netherlands, Germany), Philipp Lachenmann (Germany), Stefana McClure (USA), Su-Mei Tse (Belgium, France), Siebren Versteeg (USA)