Time as Landscape: Inquiries of Art and Science

Wonder. It is the experience of awe and inspiration; and also the action of questioning and seeking. Wonder – as experience and action – is cultivated mutually through science and art, and contemporary practices in both fields are more kindred than ever. In fact, their synergies have led in recent years to more overt cross-references and also fruitful and inventive collaborations between artists and scientists. The source of inspiration for this particular exhibition is a selection of artists who desire to understand, question and describe the subject of time: as scientific fact, as relative experience, as aesthetic archive.

The topic is timely as ongoing discussions of STEAM curriculum reverberate in our schools. The preciousness of time is also amplified by growing concerns about the environment and global mortality from a macro perspective to a micro vantage point as individuals struggle to make sense of a faster-paced, connected world where everything runs on the 24-hour news cycle.

The working checklist includes artists Darren Almond, Rosa Barba, Tacita Dean, Noah Doely, Tom LaDuke, Trevor Paglen, Tomás Saraceno, and Sara VanDerBeek.

For her powerful work The Color Out of Space (2015), Berlin-based Rosa Barba engaged in a yearlong collaboration with scientists at the Hirsch Observatory at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. The resulting installation with its film and sculptural components is a meditation on scientific inquiry and an interrogation of geologic time in human terms.

The Last Pictures, a project conceived by artist Trevor Paglen, documented our human moment and made it durable beyond conceivable time. The artist selected 100 images to express contemporary human existence and crafted, with the aid of scientists, a super-archival gold-plated disc constructed to last billions of years. This artifact was sent into synchronous orbit on the surface of the communications satellite EchoStar XVI in the fall of 2012. The Last Pictures project required years of investigation, collaboration and cross-disciplinary inquiry. Time as Landscape will include a photograph that documents the EchoStar in orbit.

Time as Landscape provides a framework for interdisciplinary engagement with the broader Rollins community. It will leverage the Museum’s contemporary collection, as well as our capsule collection of watch keys, which will be positioned in a new context to inspire discussion around these historic objects and their relationship to the contemporary. T

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website