Matter of Time

Elizabeth Dee and Almine Rech Gallery are pleased to announce Matter of Time a project by Mark Barrow and Sarah Parke at Independent Régence, Brussels.

The artists continue their exploration of the intersection between textiles, painting, and digital media with a selection of objects, a site-specific installation, and a video. The project draws a correlation between textiles as busywork[1] and time as a human-constructed metaphor that governs our relationship to objects and the universe around them.

In V838 Mon images taken by the Hubble telescope from 2002-2006 of a star that exploded over 20,000 years ago are manipulated pixel by pixel to create a 12 second animation that loops continuously. As the star explodes the pixels reveal an underlying pattern that is the same design used for fabrics in some of the paintings in the exhibition. A frame from the video is reproduced with colored film squares and installed on the skylight between the second and first floor galleries. The stained glass mosaic and the video create physical embodiments of the exploding star that translate the light traveling through space after the initial event into colored pixels moving across a screen.

Also on view are a trio of paintings whose compositions are representations of Barrow’s finger movements on an iPad. Painted by following the individual threads of Parke’s underlying woven fabric, the compositions are thus a representation of Parke’s hand/foot movements as well. As objects, the paintings serve as a record of the artists’ actions over a given period of time. Two paintings, Phase I and Phase II, from an ongoing series of sewn canvases using a changing circular motif emphasize the relationship of space, time, and thinking between works. And in the second floor gallery, a selection of the artists’ Reweaves is on display that questions those relationships. The Reweaves are created by staining plain-woven linen, pulling the fabric apart thread by thread, and reweaving those threads into two paintings with new patterns (one from the warp and one from the weft). Though the process links two paintings, each painting is unique and they are not a diptych. In fact, they are exhibited at times as pairs and at times individually. This affront to originality perhaps points to alternate models of understanding a painting similar to how things in the field of physics like comingled particles, non-locality, and inflationary theory may point to new understandings of space, time, and objects in our universe.

[1] An activity undertaken to pass time and stay busy but in and of itself has no intrinsic value