Over Time: Elizabeth Chiles

The exhibition Over Time consists of three new works, each arresting and extending time in order to contemplate our internal lives and the physical world. The first is an installation of approximately 30 images of cloud formations. The prints, mounted on aluminum, sit near one another on a hand-finished pine shelf that runs along three adjacent walls of the main gallery. In the metaphorical work investigating the human experience of time, images jump cut and morph, moving along and reappearing – going back in time and eventually becoming new. They are cell phone pictures made as notes documenting shifting experience. While the photographic frame implies intervals, it marks the transitions of lived experience – like breaths and the pauses between them. 

Screening in the back of the gallery is a single channel video with sound entitled, The Infinite Now. Images in the video morph into one another, however, here the work exists in cosmic time rather than the narrative time of human experience. This work exists in the space between the cosmic infinite and our finite understanding and view of it – a human celebration of and attempt at the sublime. The last work in the show is a diptych entitled Over Time and is a collaged view of a rhododendron tree that is behind a house Chiles stayed in during a residency in Georgia. Coming and going, she admired the tree each time and this work reflects her admiration for and memory of the plant.

Like much of Chiles’ work, she relies upon the energy of the natural world to build a language that communicates the poetics of lived experiences.
 

Opening Reception: Friday, March 25, 7-10 pm
Exhibition: March 25 – April 23, 2016
Gallery Hours: Saturdays and Wednesdays 12-5pm or by appointment