Prime Selection

At Dawn, At Dusk

Berkeley Art Center

Ongoing – August 30

Kerley, Within a Body, Within a World

When is Dawn; When is it Dusk?

How much light has to fill the night sky before it is officially day? Why is it still light after the sun has set? When does one thing become another?

In the midst of transformation, when do we realize that one thing has become something else? How much does something need to change until it is completely new? If you replace every part on a ship, is it still the same ship, a new ship – needing a new name? When the ground beneath us seems to shift at a rapid pace, news buzzing and one crisis follows the next, it becomes ever harder to pause and recognize what is happening from one moment to the next.

At Dawn, At Dusk positions itself in the blurry edges between moments, recognizing the cyclical nature in which endings and beginnings form an endless loop. Each day becomes night, each night becomes day. While this might suggest a constant movement forward in “Time” it may only be a movement is “Space.”

The works in this exhibition focus on the capacities of stillness. They prompt us to think about how time might be better understood through its tendency to loop, stretch, and speed around us.

This year’s annual juried show is significantly smaller than prior years. What BAC lost in volume it more than made up for in quality. Do yourself a favor, hie thee to Berkeley, and spend some time among these outstanding artworks.

L to R: Back, Flying Buttress;

Nguyen, oh no! there are bugs in my hands!;

[Notice the shadow at the edges of the Cyanotype. Nguyen places the work a few inches away from the wall. Creating Space, while we consider Time.]

Kim, Fountain

Pause and Look

Many of the artists in this exhibition work through abstraction, layering materials onto one another so that color and form take up new shapes and alter our understandings or assumptions about an object’s materiality. Other works consider how they communicate meaning and the contingent ways in which a viewer might be able to engage with them based upon their context.  

     Several works depict scenes that might be overlooked in the course of a day. These works confront a sense of nostalgia with a recognition of the importance of connecting with one another in even the most casual ways. Often enigmatic, these images bring out the imaginative possibilities of memory, forging relationships across time and intimacies across vast distances. So too do they picture the disquieting realities of our world, often imbued with affective charges we can’t quite explain.

     Throughout this exhibition, there is a focus on the ways that our perception might be expanded. Yet, the works also suggest that through a certain slowness we might better understand how one thing relates to another; how we relate to those around us; how the discrete pieces of our world come together into something whole.

The works loop around.

Time is Space. Space is Time.