La Durée

January 16 – March 29, 2026

Opening reception: January 16, from 6:00 – 8:00 p.m.

Artist Talk: 6:45

How does time flow? How do we experience the world within the dimension of time? Time is an abstraction; each of us experiences its passage differently. My interest in these ideas began with Cézanne and Bergson, and with questions surrounding time measured versus time experienced. Henri Bergson and Albert Einstein held differing views on the nature of time. Einstein understood time as scientific, measurable, and discrete. Bergson described duration as lived experience—something we are never outside of, but always within. Photographic time sits somewhere between these two concepts: it is neither singular nor coherent, but subjective and variable. As Geoffrey Batchen has described, photography operates as a particular articulation of time, reorganizing experience into layered, uneven, and simultaneous forms. Roland Barthes understood the photograph as always referring to what has been, a continual reminder of temporal distance and mortality. Yet the photograph can also stand outside of linear time, establishing new, complex relationships to temporality and allowing multiple times to coexist within a single image.

Artists such as Cézanne dismissed photography, which emerged during his lifetime, for presenting a dispassionate reality rather than an embodied experience of the world. For Cézanne, there was duration in looking—an oscillation between past and future that never fully rests in the present. Vision does not occur in a single, static appraisal, but through tiny, staccato movements known as saccades. These rapid movements are gathered by the brain and stitched into a cohesive visual field. Cézanne’s paintings reflect contemporary understandings of visual perception that emerged in the late nineteenth century, resisting fixed perspective in favor of relational space. This approach aligns with Bergson’s rejection of abstract, intellectualized space, emphasizing instead an intuitive synthesis of time and space as lived experience. Through unfinished passages, layered viewpoints, and perspectival shifts within the frame, Cézanne articulated time as something felt rather than measured.

While making these images, I am aware of the travel of my eye—my process of gathering a scene, collecting components that I later sort and order, finding rhythm and flow within. I explore the discontinuous nature of looking and the temporal disparities that shape contemporary perception. Though the images initially resemble panoramas, closer inspection reveals fractures, repetitions, and shifts in scale and light. These works assemble space into an illusory whole, echoing early modernist experiments with simultaneity, where multiple moments and viewpoints coexist within a single visual field.

The photographic image slices time into parcels, creating temporal distance as the present slips into the before now. The act of photographing unfolds within a different experience of time—one shaped by attention, movement, and duration. The photograph chafes at the dialectic between the instant and duration. As Barthes suggests, it also carries an anterior future within it: a reminder that what is seen has already passed, and that the viewer, too, is subject to time’s forward motion. I am drawn to the small particularities of lived time—the flicker of the eye across a scene, the acts of focus and refocus—those moments that help us describe and locate ourselves in the world.

I seek to create visual spaces that encourage slow looking, that cannot be comprehended in a single glance, but instead require the eye to wander, to explore, and to negotiate unity and disharmony. The works that most compel me are those that demand active attention, where meaning emerges through the viewer’s sustained engagement. As Robert Smithson observed, even static forms are charged with time, a charge activated through the viewer’s presence. My own relationship to these spaces is ultimately incidental to the temporal experiences they generate for others.

I want my images to embody passage—a crossing of the visual field—while retaining the irreducible fragmentations inherent in perception. It is within this tension, between continuity and rupture, flow and fracture, that I locate an experience of durée as both perceptual and poetic.