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by Lauren Gallow

Lauren Gallow is a writer, editor, and marketing consultant working the fields of art, architecture, and design. She holds a master’s degree in art & architectural history from UC Santa Barbara. She is currently the Editorial Chair of ARCADE, and her work has appeared in GRAY, Seattle Met, Dwell, and New American Paintings, among others.

A rotting apricot. A sundial with no sun. A vintage typewriter halted mid-type. Artifacts of time slowed, time stretched, time dissolved. The six artists in SOIL’s current show [placeholder] address these more nebulous aspects of time, presenting a cacophonous mix of works across media, most of which were created during the COVID-induced lockdown. Examining what they describe as our “liminal present,” the artists offer a meditation on what happens when time is suspended. More specifically, [placeholder] considers what our physical realities look like when perceptions of time become halted, shattered as they were by the shocking succession of global events unfolding in the recent past.

For painter and set designer Forrest Perrine, this sense of frozen time looks like a collection of moments unified in their uniquely 2020 absurdity: daily solo fitness routines inside an apartment, breakfast in bed over pictures of cop cars burning on the daily news, and a COVID-tracking graph rendered in shifting sand. Here, inside the hourglass, the experience of everyday life has become uncanny. Sculptor Tyna Ontko attests to this with her oversized utilitarian objects carved of yellow cedar, their scale entering them into the realm of the surreal. Nearby, Erin Elyse Burns’ video “Hold Onto Your Ego” envelopes viewers in a close-up shot of handwriting in reverse, the letters dissolving as the sound of scribbling pencils suggests the opposite. In this strange new world, without the reference points of scheduled and linear time, we tumble freefalling down the rabbit hole, each new reality more bizarre than the last.

New media artist Genevieve Tremblay embraces the spinout. Her colorful “kaleidoscapes” combine footage of botanical specimens into psychedelic autostereograms–viewing the 2D prints through an augmented reality app activates sound and video, turning the familiar strange. Jocelyn Beausire picks up this thread with her “rheum / apartment” installation, 176 pitted apricots packaged in individual specimen bags nailed neatly to the wall, their pits strewn on the floor below. The suspended apricots grow in their decay over the course of the exhibit—stasis has become productive. Painter Josh R. McDonald takes the opposite tack. Working in oil and cold wax, he drags a comb through the wet medium to activate the surfaces of his large-scale paintings. In these landscapes of undulating lines, movement is frozen.

Time moves slower at the bottom of a hill than it does at the top. This isn’t metaphor, it’s scientific fact. For most of us, time stopped somewhere in March when the world went on lockdown, and again on May 25th when George Floyd was murdered. Things are moving again, but [placeholder] suggests our relationships to time and the other organizing principles of reality have shifted. Time slowed as the deluge of horrors happening in the present brought acute action and broadened awareness to uncomfortable truths. In physics, slower time equates to less time. Less time to produce, less time to buy, less time to race to the finish line. Yet, as the artists in [placeholder] attest, less isn’t always a loss.