Chronos Cosmos: Deep Time, Open Space at Socrates Sculpture Garden

by AFineLyne, Long Island City, Socrates Sculpture Garden

 

 

Miya Ando ~ Ginga (Silver River), 2019. Steel and silk gauze. 15 x 3.5 x 91 feet. Images courtesy the artist and Socrates Sculpture Park. The title is the Japanese word for galaxy and draws on Japanese understanding of time as informed by and experienced through the natural world. The installation is suspended along the Park’s East River shoreline.

Chronos Cosmos: Deep Time, Open Space transforms Socrates Sculpture Park into a gateway to the universe, presenting artworks that consider space, time, and matter in relationship to celestial entities and earth-bound processes. In the open-air environment of the Long Island City waterfront park, the exhibition uses scale to put the universe in context, creating connection points to space and time.

Eduardo Navarro, Galactic Playground, Concrete, paint, text, sunlight. 42 feet diameter, gnomon: 7 feet tall, diameter 21 inches. Image courtesy the artist and Socrates Sculpture Park. Galactic Playground is a 42 foot hexagonal field of play and observation, operates like a lyrical sundial, with its gnomon’s shadow pointing to painted verses instead of numbers.

nformed by Earth’s place amid a vast universe, Chronos Cosmos: Deep Time, Open Space zooms far out – featuring cosmic perspectives, various scales of time and space, and speculative gestures. Each artist’s own notions of time, history, space, and site challenge the reigning system regulated by technocratic and colonial standards.

Together the works reveal a coexistence of disjointed times in our contemporary world: clocked and measured time, rhythmic biological time, earthly time, the flowing time of human experience, anticipatory time, historical and anachronistic time, serial and simultaneous time, as well as technologically mediated time.

Alicja Kwade, REVOLUTION (Gravitas), 2017. Stainless Steel, stone. 99 x 139 x 137 inches. Image courtesy the artist and Socrates Sculpture Park. The installation is reminiscent both of planetary orbits in space and Niels Bohr’s diagram of the atom. The piece unites two fields of observation. VAlicja Kwade also on view on the MET Roof Garden.

Situating a contemporary consciousness between the origins of the Earth and the expansion of the universe, these works each uniquely orient the viewer in time and space to produce a renewed sense of wonder toward our planet. This perspective creates potential for alternative modes of social relationships, sustainable human/planet co-existence, and political agency.

The works are informed by a variety of sources, including atomic physics, amateur astronomy, afro-futurist theory, and non-western histories and ancient perspectives and knowledge:

Radcliffe Bailey, Vessel III, 2018. 150 x 104 x 104 inches. Image courtesy the artist and Socrates Sculpture Park. The installation suggests a fluid ordering of spacetime where past, present, and future mingle in memories and anticipation of lived experience.

Chronos Cosmos: Deep Time, Open Space will be on view at Socrates Sculpture Park from May 5 through September 2, 2019. Participating artists include Radcliffe Bailey, Beatriz Cortez, Alicja Kwade, Eduardo Navarro, Heidi Neilson, and Oscar Santillán with new commissions by Miya Ando, William Lamson, and (MDR) Maria D. Rapicavoli.

Socrates Sculpture Garden is located at 32-01 Vernon Boulevard at the intersection of Broadway in Long Island City. The Garden is free and open to the public 365 days a year from 9am to sunset.

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