Time is a River Sophie Friedman-Pappas, Emily Janowick, Valerie Keane, Dominic Palarchio, mosie romney, Cal Siegel May 29 - July 6, 2025 curated by Travis Fairclough opening thursday may 29, 6-8pm
Time is a river converging and splintering off, turning in place and extending out of sight in both directions. If you tap a body of water in two points at once, the water will ripple, spread, and overlap to create a shifting pattern where both waves meet. This point of contact is known as wave superposition, a term also used to describe the phenomenon of particles that exist in two places at once.
Time is a River* brings together works by Cal Siegel, Dominic Palarchio, Emily Janowick, mosie romney, Sophie Friedman-Pappas, and Valerie Keane. Oscillating between synergy and disruption, these works together attempt to mirror the internal superposition operating within each individually.
Abstraction and figuration, digital precision and hand-torn gestures, found and fabricated forms bisect one another, each continually reframing the next. Like the explosion that set in motion both the chaos of scattered matter and its simultaneous ordering, the resolve of each work is experienced as a frozen moment of temporality, a peak in a cadence of multiple time signatures that come together and fall apart.
The original subjects recede from view. Only traces of the figure remain in the figure/ground relationship, leaving behind the residue of brushes that hold the hair of people we do not see, the scorched markings of a kiln emptied of the ceramics fired, the displaced shingles of an unknown architecture. These disjointed forms and recombined symbols recast, through allusion, their subject's histories as the present tense.
*The exhibition title is a direct reference to Paul Thek’s (1933-1988) painting Time Is a River, c. 1988 (Philadelphia Museum of Art) completed in the months leading up to his death.