Curated by Max Warsh

Over the course of the past year, the expansion and contraction of time has become routine. The ubiquitous questions of “what day is it?” or “I can’t believe it’s already Friday!” arise from the slow, monotonous drone of the day-to-day, blanketing our lives with a sense of dislocation I can only compare to the experience of living in Los Angeles where the sun always shines and memories morph into atmospheric conditions. At the same time society has regressed and accelerated at an exponential pace causing a numbing effect—we know we are living through a historic moment, yet each day is perhaps more historic than the previous one, leaving past days in the dust. 

What if time travel is not the ability to move through time, rather just a repositioning of the perception of time so that notions of linear time collapse into a cacophonous field of collected moments that can be accessed at any time? What if any moment can be accessed through a material object, whether a book, drawing, or sculpture akin to a token that many time-travel scenarios provide for the traveller to locate themselves across the continuum? It is in response to these questions and states of being where the artists and artworks in this exhibition come together at this moment, as they look at the material world through its perceptual and temporal potential; and it is through the lens of this past year that we can view these artworks as openings to new pathways for comprehending time.  

As the newspaper, "The Bellona Times,” in Samuel R. Delany’s epic science fiction novel Dhalgren, prints erratic dates jumping from April 1, 1979 to July 17, 1969 to October 24, 1985, the reader must ask if this is in fact a leap in time within the arc of the story, or do these dates mark the irrelevance of linear time within the hallucinatory post-apocalypse narrative. In this latter reading, Delany positions time as a mood in a way that also mirrors the current moment, and further sets the framework for considering the works in this exhibition.

Fabienne Lasserre’s hanging/standing orbs, discs, ovals, and shards glide along gradients of opacity/transparency, visibility/invisibility and dimensionality. They invite, absorb and reflect both light and vision as they and we are in perpetual motion together. They are bodies standing in for doorways and windows, slivers of hand-made architecture for a compounding present and speculative future. Lasserre’s sculptures are access points demarcating momentary shifts in perception while also carving out space for new ways of seeing.

The aggregation of material and time find a home in Yamini Nayar’s photographs. Each image contains a site constructed through building forms of plaster, paper wood, paint and/or other materials. Allowing the accumulation of material to metamorphose into elegantly precarious structures, Nayar decides when to flatten and capture the image into the paper of the photograph. Each photograph holds multitudes of moments and actions, in some cases multiple exposures, they contain and unravel time; they are composite storyboards, monuments to the unconscious impulse to build and shelter.

Flowers become fabric, words become flowers, words become vessels, flowers become architecture. Rosemary Mayer’s drawings of flower forms, tulip petals, carnivorous plants and still lifes embody the duality contained in her acute observation over days in the studio coupled with the magnitude of a classical history that has studied such forms for hundreds of years. Forever committed as a diarist and journaler of the day-to-day, Mayer’s attention to the moment-to-moment shifts in light, vibrancy and decay in her subjects reflect broader tendencies in Mayer’s work to look at the arch of history in relation to her personal lived experience as an artist in her time.

 -Max Warsh

“Exuberance of gilded stucco, ingenious, intricate, vaulting altars bursting with angels and light over plaster clouds spilling out like the branding curving stucco racing in countless gilded trails, coursing near the ceiling, unfolding in limitless variety”

  -excerpt from text in Rosemary Mayer’s drawing Untitled, (part of the pinning down of flowers), 1975

Artist Bios

Fabienne Lasserre (b.1973), a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship recipient in 2019, grew up in Montreal, Canada and received her MFA from Columbia University. Lasserre's current solo show, Eye Contact, is on view at TURN Gallery until April 24, 2021 and her work is currently on view at the Tang Museum in a rotating exhibition in Nicole Cherubini’s installation. Her most recent solo exhibitions were held at Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center, Buffalo, NY; Parisian Laundry Gallery, Montreal; and Palazzo Costa Tretenerro, Piacenza, Italy. Two person exhibits include Safe Gallery, New York with Annette Wehrhahn and 315 Gallery, New York with Ezra Tessler. Lasserre has participated in numerous group exhibitions including (upcoming) CPM, Baltimore, MD; Ceysson de Bénétière, Luxembourg; TURN Gallery, New York; Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, TX; Museo de Antioquia, Medellin, Colombia, and Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal. In 2017, she was awarded the Saint-Gaudens Memorial Fellowship to produce two outdoor sculptures for the grounds of the park. In 2016-17, she received a Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program award. She is Co-director of the graduate program MFA in Studio Arts (MFAST) at MICA in Baltimore. Lasserre currently lives and works in Brooklyn.

Yamini Nayar ( b.1975) has shown her work internationally at venues including the Museum of Moderne Kunst Frankfurt, Freud Museum London, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Queensland Art Gallery in Australia, DeCordova Museum MA, Kiran Nadar Museum New Delhi, Sharjah Biennial in UAE, Saatchi Gallery UK, Studio Museum of Harlem and recently a presentation at Serendipity Arts Festival, Goa, India. Her work is in many public and private collections including the Solomon Guggenheim Museum NY, Kiran Nadar Museum, Saatchi Museum, Queensland Art Gallery, Cincinnati Art Museum, Hiscox and US Arts in Embassies, JP Morgan Chase. Her work is published in Global Photography: A Critical History (2019), Chandigarh is in India (Shoestring Publishers, 2016), Passages: Indian Art Today (Daab Media, 2014), Lines of Control, Partition as a Productive Space (Green Cardamom 2012), Unfixed: Postcolonial Photography in Contemporary Art (Jap Sam Books, 2013); Empire Strikes Back: Contemporary Indian Art Today (Saatchi) and Manual for Treason: Sharjah Biennial (2011). She has been featured in New York Times, New Yorker, Art India, Artforum, Art in America, Frieze, Vogue India, Artpapers, and others. Nayar is a recipient of the Lightborne Fellowship, Aaron Siskind Fellowship at SVA and an Art Matters Foundation travel grant (to Chandigarh, India). She received her MFA from the School of Visual Arts, NY where she studied with Sarah Charlesworth, and BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design, with prior studies in philosophy and psychology at Eugene Lang College, NY.and University of Michigan. Nayar's work is represented by Thomas Erben New York, Wendi Norris San Francisco and Jhaveri Contemporary Mumbai. Yamini Nayar is based in Brooklyn, NY.

Rosemary Mayer (1943-2014) was a prolific artist involved in the New York art scene beginning in the late 1960s. Most well-known for her large-scale sculptures using fabric as the primary material, she also created works on paper, artist books, and outdoor installations, exploring themes of temporality, history, and biography. A pioneer of the feminist art movement, she was a founding member of A.I.R. Gallery, the first cooperative gallery for women in the U.S. and had one of the earliest shows there. During the 1970s and 1980s, her work was also shown at many New York alternative art spaces, including The Clocktower, Sculpture Center, and Franklin Furnace, and in university galleries throughout the country. In 2016, Southfirst Gallery in Brooklyn exhibited a selection of Mayer’s work from the late 1960s and early 1970s. The first major exhibit of her work in over thirty years, it was reviewed in The New York Times, Art in America, The New Yorker, and artforum.com. A version of this show was exhibited at the Lamar Dodd School of Art at the University of Georgia in 2017. Her work has also been included in several group exhibitions in New York including at Nicelle Beauchene Gallery, Murray Guy Gallery, and Bridget Donahue. In 2020, her work was introduced to European audiences through Nick Mauss’s exhibition, “Bizarre Silks, Private Imaginings and Narrative Facts, etc.,” at Kunsthalle Basel and “Rods Bent Into Bows,” at Chert Lüdde in Berlin. The show in Berlin was Mayer’s first solo show in Europe; it won the prestigious VBKI Prize for Berlin galleries and included in Frieze magazine’s list of the best shows in Europe. Exhibitions upcoming in 2021 include a solo show at Gordon Robichaux and the Swiss Institute in New York.

Max Warsh (b. 1980) is an artist and curator who lives and works in New York City. He received his MFA in Photography from the University of Illinois at Chicago in 2004, and his BA from Sarah Lawrence College in 2002. He is Co-director of the Estate of Rosemary Mayer, and the Director of Programming for the New Art Dealers Alliance (NADA). From 2010-2017, he was co-founder and director of the artist-run gallery Regina Rex (NY), where he organized numerous exhibitions. His artwork has been included in exhibitions at the Queens Museum, the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), the Eduardo Sívori Museum in Buenos Aires, AR and the Sirius Arts Centre in Cobh, Ireland; and galleries such as CPM, The Pit, Longhouse Projects, New Captial, Shoot the Lobster and others.