matter of time 2024

Exhibited at Whitney Museum Independent Study Program, Westbeth Gallery, NY, NY, and Smack Mellon, Brooklyn, NY.

matter of time traces the interwoven temporalities of natural and synthetic materials. Images of various plastic objects are embedded on irregularly shaped shards of bisque-fired Pleistocene clay and are placed inside a vitrine that echoes the aesthetics of archaeological display. The materials that make up the pieces—the wild Pleistocene clay and marine plastic debris—were found along the shorelines of outer Cape Cod during the artist's residency in Provincetown, MA.

By printing images of the detritus of everyday life onto fired clay slabs—fragments that resemble both ancient tablets and futuristic relics—matter of time proposes a hybrid material archive. These objects become artificial fossils: artifacts of a world shaped equally by extraction, migration, decay, and transformation. They index not only the temporal entanglement of matter but also the imprint of human and non-human histories alike. The installation gestures toward a speculative archaeology—one that resists linear time and instead foregrounds how materiality holds, distorts, and transmits memory across epochs. In this way, matter of time is less an object and more a meditation on duration.

The work draws on the deep history of its central materials: over 20,000 years ago, glaciers, 2 miles thick in some places, carried this fine-grained, iron-rich clay southward, depositing it as they receded. Once settled at the bottom of kettle ponds, this ancient matter has re-emerged through erosion, now unearthed and repurposed as a substrate for contemporary image-making. The clay’s slow geologic journey contrasts sharply with the faster, more volatile movements of marine plastic debris, whose presence and speed in oceanic currents challenge notions of permanence and place. Though separated by thousands of years in their arrival, both materials now coexist in the same coastal terrain. Yet plastic, too, is a product of deep time—derived from fossil fuels formed over millions of years from the remains of ancient organisms. In this sense, the synthetic is not outside nature, but entangled with it, echoing extractive logics that bind environmental degradation to histories of racialized and terrestrial violence.