September 11 – October 31, 2021, 403 Colonels Row, Governors Island
Simon Benjamin, Keith Edmier, Tessa Grundon, Jemila MacEwan, and Hanae Utamura
With work by WetLab students Rhea Barve, Jesse McLaughlin, and Kris Waymire
Curated by Eugenia Kisin and Karen Holmberg
A shrine propitiating fungi ancestors, a jellyfish adorned with microplastic regalia, an apothecary of healing tinctures made from disappearing landscapes – these and other restorative structures inhabit the layered timescales of this place as ruin. Working against time, the artists in Contretemps ask us to engage with collective loss through care, feeding, and reverence. Refusing to remain in the moment of mishap, they hold in common signs of quiet emergence and flourishing after disaster. These slow processes materialize in a geologic sigh caught in glass; wound in a tangle of willow branches, drawing out heavy metals from contaminated soil; in cores of coastline and diasporic detritus; and in the crown of a prehistoric cycad bloom, cradled in basalt.
Together, these artists encounter living matter in a state of ambivalence. Suspended between sadness, wonder, and repair, their works bear witness to post-human and posthumous emergence in the wake of human-made destruction. They show us that catastrophe renders nature historical, revealing the impact of human activity on non-human processes. Stepping out of historical time risks dissolving the effects of human action in the stream of geological duration, in which our world-historical mistake, our catastrophic contretemps, turns out, after all, to have been a well-timed error, a fortunate fall.
Is the (re)turn to non-human time, then, a cover-up of our complicity in planetary violence, both slow and rapid? Or do we turn against time not to escape history but to mark rupture? Not to elude blame, but to retrace fault lines between our disconnected present and our interconnected past, between humanity and its extended family, its long-lost kin? The works and beings in Contretemps counter human time to counteract its effects – to fulfill, in artist Jemila MacEwan’s words, “the utopic desire to reverse the inevitable process of extinction,” to recover lost ancestors and lost memories. To recover lost time by uncovering its loss.
A project space of the NYU Gallatin WetLab, this exhibition will also be lived with and animated by students through art-writing, performance, and environmental science.
The exhibition is open weekends, 11am-5pm Book ferry tickets to Governors Island here.
Image credit: Hanae Utamura, Porpita plástica, 2021
