Time never ceases to deceive

Bite of time, fading memory 

10/12/13 - 11/10/13 

LVL3 

"Time is making fools of us again." –Dumbledore

In the hyper-reality of today, all experiences are of simulations of reality. It is a world of semiotics. Barthes talks about this world as everything existing in relation to something else: everything as a sign, while the referent is gone and is actually no more relevant. All emotions, interactions, experiences are of imagery, relating to other imagery. “Simulation” is the imitation of a real-world process or system, in which the sign becomes the value of things, hence the meaning (Baudrillard). Everything in this capitalist society is offering us something that seems better than real life, in order to sell something. This sort of imitation not only reproduces reality, but tries to improve it. The illusion of capturing something and presenting the experience is satisfying “without nourishing” (Sontag). Perhaps nostalgia is a phenomenon that dodges all these bullets.

Bite of reality, fading memory, an exhibition currently up at LVL3 gallery, brings together the artists Austin Lee, Sabina Ott, and Evan Roberts who have used feel-ing (verb) as their subject matter. In the open space, that was once interrupted with a column which is now transformed into a living room centerpiece by Ott, we have Lee’s paintings that are juvenile and simplistic in gesture, next to Ott’s structures that are intricate and fragile yet heavy, and Robarts’ assemblages that are demanding and disembedding, calling on things long gone.  

Lee’s paintings have the same effect of an SMS break-up. They say exactly what they mean –flat on the surface, and depriving of sentiments. However, given the nature of it, the human brain looks for underlying meanings –perhaps a way out of it, since we are given none. Bright, colorful, and flat surfaces of these paintings are lacking a point of entry/exit because of their straightforwardness. Since we are not welcome in the paintings, we are confronted with “new wandering thoughts”, and just like that the paintings become heavy. At the left hand side of a wall, two faces with a mutual frown are looking over to the other side of the gallery, and a woman is crying. From that point on, a woman comes, sits down in front of you, and cries. Women always cry.

In an age in which everything and everyone is defined by their functions, Sabina Ott assembles and repurposes “functional objects” and evokes a childish nostalgia. Understanding things is based on how they function, and functioning is only explained in time. When presented with her brightly colored, somewhat industrial structures, and a pot of plant in the middle of the room that ties everything together, we are thrown back to every living room we ever entered, occupied, and lived in. Houseplants are the epitome of ornaments and with that single gesture, Ott creates a cluster of spaces and sentiments in our brains. The impermanence of the plant is similar to that of the memory, her sculptures feel fragile yet heavy as is memory.

While Ott’s expandable spray foam structures that resemble plaster fences feel like they are going to to crumble away any second, Evan Robarts’ metal fences encapsulate us within a state of constant throwbacks. Robarts is the homerun of the show. By hanging up metal fences, with balls stuck within their chain links, the artist creates “repurposed ephemera”. The image of a baseball getting caught in a fence speaks to, even though very personal memories, a collective one. This small moment that is supposed to exist for a short period of time, when frozen in time and space, is stabilized and made into a constant. The viewer is as stuck in the uncomfortable moment as the ball in the fence. The pieces reek of naiveté that is long gone –even for people who never played catch or baseball as kids. Nostalgia is always so painstakingly optimistic –unbearable, each time. It is not a matter of wishing something gone was still present that is unsettling, but the mere fact that it had to be left behind and let go of. At one point, everyone left their naiveté behind, tucked in bed, stuck in a fence. Time never ceases to deceive.

It is a very modernist utopia: to design a world devoid of the human element of chaos and trouble. Modernism tends to posit fixed and unmovable relationships between people and spaces by trying to capture Experience within a space. However, it is impossible to fake or create experience out of scratch –that is both satisfying and nourishing, anyway. Bite of time, fading memory goes against any means of erasure of the human trace. The artists Lee, Ott, and Robarts, rather than creating signs that have long lost their signifiers; rather than employing signs that have become the value itself, instead, through abstracting and freezing the human element of chaos, create a collective nostalgia that resists all time zones and timelines.