Time Frames/2020

“Time is the most unknown of all unknown things”
-Aristotle, 500 B.C.

“But what is time?”
-Brian Greene, 2004 -New York Times

My work, TIME FRAMES integrates digital photography with painting and the appropriation of cinematic images to create pictures that conjure the sensation of looking simultaneously at various moments in time, or looking through time. 

The layers begin within the photos, where some reflection and distortion have been included as part of the photographic process to impart the sensation of looking through a digitally generated veil of atmospheric haze.

One element of particular significance is the image of a lamp with a zigzag shade, which appears in many of the works. This lamp is not part of the appropriated cinematic image, but is actually in the room as the photo is taken and is being reflected from the television screen. The lamp therefore contributes to the digital distortion of light while also appearing connected to the narrative of many of the pictures.

The thickly applied paint in the works conjures notions of lava or a molten substance of a cosmic nature, therefore alluding to a more cosmological time frame and providing a proportional perspective into the nature of what we call “Time”.

 Through the additive process of applying thick, viscous paint mixtures as well as other materials such as yarn and burlap, I strategically subtract from the narrative of the photograph, thereby creating a layered visual experience, which unfolds upon further viewing.

This layered visual amalgam speaks to the enigma of time and our inability to define it. Modern theories of quantum mechanics and relativity such as The Wheeler-Dewitt Equation, B-Theory, The Theory of Everything (Stephen Hawking) and Quantum Gravity, all suggest that the unifying of Relativity (gravity) with Quantum mechanics (matter) would render time into an imaginary construct.

Nonetheless, we depend upon time to define our lives and we look upon our past as a means of defining our future. Our entire global civilization is constructed of events that define who we are collectively as a human race.

Looking at various events and social constructs in retrospect has evolved into an innate and inherent means of sociologically navigating our way forward.

In many societies, socio-cultural constructs once considered fully sanctioned and appropriate, like public beheadings, slavery and the oppression of women,  have been uniformly condemned and considered barbaric.

In Time Frames the goal is to reify the sensation of the inherent process of retrospection as a means of aesthetically reinforcing this tendency, which has long served our societal growth, and to do so optimistically, given that aspirations toward higher understanding dwell within the vast majority of us all.

This work raises culturally relevant questions about the connections between the nature of time and the unfolding of human sociocultural evolution. The photo-paintings are thusly, contemplative constructs, from which one can view the human condition through the lens of the geologic, the anthropological, the cosmological and the surreal.

-Richard Heinsohn  2020