"Passing Time" January 27 - March 4, 2012 in Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery
Passing Time January 27–March 4, 2012
Exhibition to feature works by artists from Argentina, Australia, Luxembourg,
France, Germany, The Netherlands, United Kingdom, United States
Middletown, Conn., December 19, 2011— Passing Time, a new exhibition of recent works by fourteen international artists in a range of media, explores the multiple and converging meanings of the phrase “passing time." Organized by guest curators Ginger Gregg Duggan and Judith Hoos Fox of c2 curatorsquared, the exhibition will be on view in Wesleyan University’s Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery, located at 283 Washington Terrace on the Wesleyan campus in Middletown, from Friday, January 27 through Sunday, March 4, 2012. Gallery hours are Tuesday through Sunday from Noon to 4pm. Gallery admission is free.
The public is invited to attend the opening reception on Tuesday, January 31, 2012 from 5pm to 7pm, with a gallery talk at 5:30pm by guest curator Judith Hoos Fox. The opening reception is free.
The various meanings of the phrase “passing time”—spending time, time to die—are explored in the evocative imagery of the works in Passing Time—video, photography, sculpture and works on paper. Some artists turn to sport, some to music; some refer to nature and its rhythms to explore concepts of time—short term, long term and terminating. Others partner with time itself in their making of art. Time is a concept that philosophers and physicists ponder. Time provides a framework that orders, measures and defines. We spend time, we waste it, we keep it; time flies, it drags. It is elastic in its perception—long when we are young, gaining momentum as we age. The Passing Time exhibition explores the relationship between the time of our life and the time of the eons.
Following the engagement at Wesleyan University, Passing Time will travel to the Richard E. Peeler Art Center at DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana and other venues through the fall of 2013. In 2010, c2 curatorsquared organized the exhibition Connectivity Lost which addressed the ways we are estranged from each other and from the environment in which we live. Connectivity Lost was on view in the Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery from September 11 through December 6, 2010.
"We are really glad to be back at Wesleyan for a second exhibition," said Ms. Fox. "We first identified Passing Time as a subject being explored by a great number of artists across the world and across media about four years ago. The Venice Biennale was particularly rich. That is where we saw the Shaun Gladwell Storm Sequence. Maybe it’s the speed at which we all live these days, on fast forward, that makes artists start to look at time. Maybe we were particularly aware of the subject because of things going on in our own lives – children growing up before our eyes; an older generation dying."
The artists, known and emerging, featured in Passing Time include Matthew Buckingham (United States), Jonathan Callan (United Kingdom), Luis Camnitzer (United States), Rineke Dijkstra (The Netherlands), Ken Fandell (United States), Shaun Gladwell (Australia), Felix Gonzalez-Torres (United States), Leandro Katz (Argentina), Katrin Korfmann (The Netherlands, Germany), Philipp Lachenmann (Germany), Stefana McClure (United States), Su-Mei Tse (Luxembourg, France), Siebren Versteeg (United States), and Bill Viola (United States).
"The North Gallery [of the Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery is a wonderful place for a room-sized installation of video, and we are putting Siebren Versteeg’s dual projection live feed piece there. We really want to take advantage of the elegant glass link to that gallery, and are working on a way to install the Katrin Korfmann light box piece in this link. And Luis Camnitzer's Last Words should read powerfully when placed [on the far back wall]. Each work [in Passing Time] is there because of the particular voice it brings to the conversation," said Ms. Fox.
About c2, curatorsquared
c2 curatorsquared is a curatorial partnership formed in 2008 between Ginger Gregg Duggan and Judith Hoos Fox that develops exhibitions of international, cross-media contemporary art and design that explore current cultural issues. The two met in 2001, while Ms. Duggan was the curator at the Museum of Art in Fort Lauderdale, and the two coordinated the presentation of two exhibitions that Ms. Fox had organized while at the Davis Museum at Wellesley College. Their collaboration began to take form when Ms. Duggan moved on to be the curator at the Bellevue Art Museum in Washington, where they worked together on the conception of the exhibition OVER + OVER that ultimately opened at the Krannert Art Museum at the University of Illinois and toured nationally. Ms. Fox came to Boston after graduate school to be curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art. She has been curator at the Davis Museum and Cultural Center at Wellesley College for 19 years and has held visiting curator posts at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Harvard Art Museums and Tufts University Art Gallery. Ms. Duggan previously held curatorial posts at the Fort Lauderdale Museum of Art and the Bellevue Art Museum in Washington State and is currently based in Orlando, Florida. Together they have organized exhibitions for museums across the US and abroad.
For more information about c2 curatorsquared, please visit http://www.curatorsquared.com.