Passed, Present, Future

Featuring work by Paul Higham, Brooke Monte, Sarah Smith, and Julie Ward

Root Gallery, RL Photo Studio
27 Sears Ln, Burlington, VT 05401

Opening Reception Friday, May 26th 6-9 pm

Employing sculpture, painting, mixed media, and photography, four artists illustrate how the element of time intertwines and provides an essential foundation, capturing in each of them a certain moment with four inherently different approaches. Time is constantly moving. The present moment is just that, a moment in time that soon comes to pass. How, in thinking about this, are we then able to present time as it is in the past, present and future?

Julie Ward utilizes mixed media to explore the idea that time is cumulative. The past affects the present which in turn affects the future. All are building blocks in and of each other. Paul Higham harvests grains of data from real world sources such as 'thought' itself, to the flow of water and the freezing of the dollar thereby showing the flux and dynamics of emergent data and societal transformations over time. Sarah Smith looks at time through the lens of photography. She is interested in the concept of capturing a moment in time, that also is able to look into the past, while conveying what was happening in that present moment, and what this may say about the future. Brooke Monte is inspired by metamorphosis in visual imagery and how time allows images to evolve as the mind processes the visual signal.

Paul Higham
These Data driven artworks deal with the commodification of information and dynamics of data itself. I harvest grains of data from digital streams mined from population in real time, revealing organicity, hysteresis & turbulence within our culture, showing the flux of societal transformations such as the freeze and crash of the dollar. When I retrieve real world data from sources such as the Statue of Liberty, The Texts of Malthus, Dow Jones Index, Gold Futures, as well as GPS, Weather & Satellite streams I synthesize them with coding & genetic algorithms, perturb them with virus & noise in order to generate automata in series thus creating new vectoral forms, a process I call ‘Autotecture,’ producing works I refer to as ‘Data Sculpture’ : 'As form follows function'.
Works are output as objects through cnc/rapid prototype technology or as flat maps. The works are shown in multiple states as data sculpture & data sonification or left in their real time evolving virtual state as installations and projections.

Brooke Monte
As a human species we have witnessed celestial objects arc across our sky in a circular fashion, lending us insight to the complexity of our existence in time. From a more localized, personal perspective time seems more of linear path. The past, the present and the future collide as an immense accumulation of cause and effect that forges onward.
 In this work I explore the aesthetic pathways of consecutive parallel ribbons. Each stripe is painted as a translucent ribbon of a variety of mediums and pigments. They remain parallel even through curves which illuminate a notion of scale. These stripes sometimes exit the field of view and possibly return again. Some of these fields have been cropped and reassembled. Sometimes stripes connect again in the reassemblage of fields but their consecutive ribbon order is reversed. All of these aspects function as possible metaphors of our experience of time.

Sarah Smith
The greatest failure of photography is its inherent nostalgia. It forces us to constantly look backwards, filling present voids with imperfect depictions of the past. Photographs promise something permanent yet their very existence is a direct result of how ephemeral the experiences they represent actually are. They fall pitifully short in capturing the essence of what we want them to represent, yet we still expect them to act as stand-ins for the past. My work, while stemming from autobiographical experiences, investigates our relationship, expectations, and attachment to the photographic image. The images are direct, photographed with an objective distance that hovers between the intimate and the analytic. Linear time is disregarded as the very existence of a photograph is an interruption to that system. Photographs can be reflected on with both sorrow and delight as their presence suggests a glimpse of our past, present, and future all in one moment. The expectation that photography can be equated with foreverness is undone through images of unending landscapes, ailing pets, and the nostalgia associated with vernacular images and documents.

Julie Ward
My hand cannot and will not move without a stratum, section, layer, band, vein, chord, tier, of our 10 year old self, coupled with our 39 year old self, coupled with our 60 year old self experiencing the vibration of this movement. This understanding allows me to exist within and also be a rhizome. Rhizomes move through us, rhizomes are in us; rhizomes are all around us, leaving traces and maps. These traces and maps are sometimes seen and at times they are neither fully felt nor fully heard until later in life. Rhizomes are long streaming narratives that both reveal and conceal secrets. It is no secret, I am a maker.