MACHINES TO CRYSTALLIZE TIME
Machines to Crystallize Time is a new body of work by CJ Mahony and Georgie Grace created uniquely for Smiths Row. The exhibition brings together their shared interests in temporary states and immersive experiences, which they create via built spaces, through language, and on screen. The works in the exhibition range from small sculptural objects, large scale structures and lighting interventions to video projection and sound. The changing light throughout the day forms part of the work, shifting the atmosphere in the gallery and inviting us to consider how we experience the flow of time and how we perceive ourselves in space. CJ Mahony’s structures dissect the gallery to delineate slowly unfolding spaces and sites for interaction with projection. Inspired by photographs of now non-existent Russian Constructivist sculptures of the early twentieth century, she plays with perceptions of
scale, manipulating ideas of presence and absence through the interplay between objects and shadows. Georgie Grace has created a series of new video projections which respond to Mahony’s constructions. Containing textual elements which evoke the marking of time in language, they explore the idea of video as a technology that both interrupts and captures time. The movement between different points in time and space lies at the centre of both artists’ investigation. Machines to Crystallize Time asks the question of how we might be transported through time using images and language, to experience things that no longer exist or to see reflections of what might exist in the future.
EVENTS
DISCUSSION: PROPOSITIONS FOR TIME TRAVEL Thursday 5 February, 6 – 8pm Join us for a panel of speakers who will offer different propositions on themes from the exhibition. CJ Mahony and Georgie Grace, will be joined by astronomer Robin Catchpole and curators Jes Fernie and Lizzie Fisher.
CRAFTIVITIES Saturday 7 February, 10.30 – 4.30pm Join us for some informal self-guided activities for families related to the exhibition. Suitable for children aged 3-9.
EXHIBITION TOUR AND BRUNCH Saturday 28 February, 10.30 - 11.30am Join curator Natalie Pace for an informal tour of the exhibition followed by coffee and croissants.
Machines to Crystallize Time began as a conversation about how we attempt to depict the past. A still image cannot convey the experience of video, or of an immersive installation: they are both unfolding experiences, a series of carefully composed limited views, staged in near darkness. CJ Mahony’s installations are temporary, but each one gives birth to the next in its disassembly. Sections, angles and supports become parts of something new. The structures in Machines to Crystallize Time are descendants of earlier works The Trouble with Time (2013) and Parameters (2014), now dissolved into Intervals, which act to delineate space and surface. In response to this line through time, Georgie Grace’s projections contain shapes from both these now non-existent works, recollectionimages that form a ‘little crystalline seed.’1 Their forms and angles are transposed into flickering, temporary cut outs. Images of the past flow over the surfaces of the present, and at the same time become memories themselves. As Maurizio Lazzarato puts it in his essay Machines to Crystallize Time, from which the show takes its title, ‘perception is always already memory.’ 2 He writes ‘there is nothing save for the flows of images that encounter one another, collide, reflect, compose and decompose one another.’ In contrast to the still image, ‘video images are contractions and dilations, vibrations and
tremors of light, rather than tracings, reproductions of reality.’3 The structures in the gallery create contractions and dilations of space, just as the light of the video projection causes the pupil of the eye to contract and dilate. They produce an immersive environment of refractions and unfoldings in time and of movement. They are also a series of flows between dimensions. The flatness of digital collage is split and tilted backwards and forwards in space, and the three dimensional forms of the sculptures are rendered two dimensional in shadows cast by the projected light. Both redistribute one another. The sculptures are derived from the drawings, and equally the drawings are derived from the sculptures, forming a circuit between the two and three dimensional. These three dimensions are visible. Time, the fourth dimension, is invisible to us. Further dimensions exist only as hypotheses or models. The spinning calabi-yau manifolds at the entrance to the exhibition are models, representing a conjecture of six dimensional spacetime. In string theory it is possible for two such manifolds to look very different geometrically but nevertheless be equivalent. This is mirror symmetry, a reflection that is visually non-identical, an idea that carries over into the exhibition as a poetic echo, along with Deleuze’s description of the time crystal as ‘a mobile mirror which endlessly reflects perception in recollection.’4
These three dimensions are visible. Time, the fourth dimension, is invisible to us. Further dimensions exist only as hypotheses or models. The spinning calabi-yau manifolds at the entrance to the exhibition are models, representing a conjecture of six dimensional spacetime. In string theory it is possible for two such manifolds to look very different geometrically but nevertheless be equivalent. This is mirror symmetry, a reflection that is visually non-identical, an idea that carries over into the exhibition as a poetic echo, along with Deleuze’s description of the time crystal as ‘a mobile mirror which endlessly reflects perception in recollection.’4 The time crystal incorporates the environment that forces it to crystallize. It is a circuit of actual and virtual images, a point of indiscernibility between the two. It is the moment when time splits as it arises. The works in the exhibition are a series of reiterations and refractions; in Lazzarato’s words, they are ‘machines to contract, to condense time,’ a ‘perpetual distinction in the making that gathers its terms back into itself, in order incessantly to relaunch them.5
of a continuum between sculptural object and immersive environment, experimenting with smaller scale pieces placed within wider experience. Her current research is influenced by geometry, magic, crystals, and her musing on the architecture of the cathedral as a space of transformation and transfiguration. Underpinning her work is the idea of a shattered whole and the desire to create objects in spaces that induce an altered state, a tremor, a sense of being consumed. Georgie Grace works with video, text, and installation. Her practice examines modes and limits of immersion and perception via the distinction between still and moving image. She works frame by frame with digital imagery, exploiting the possibilities abstraction and flicker to create intensified, sometimes physically discomforting experiences of perception. Her current projects experiment with the placement and distribution of video in space and how variations in scale and staging impact upon its immersive capabilities.
CJ Mahony & Georgie Grace 2015 CJ Mahony’s work ranges from large scale immersive constructions to fragile, speculative models. Central to her practice is the creation of presentness through the manipulation of space. Recently she has been exploring the idea
1 Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image 2 Lazzarato, Machines to Crystallize Time 3 Lazzarato, Machines to Crystallize Time 4 Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image 5 Lazzarato, Machines to Crystallize Time
SMITHS R
SMITHS ROW SERIES are publications available online which aim to extend conversations around our exhibition programme.
CJ Mahony & Georgie Grace would like to thank the following: Niki Braithwaite Jane Morrow and Firstsite Michael Irwin Ryan Withers Andrew Crawford-White
Smiths Row The Market Cross Cornhill Bury St Edmunds Suffolk IP33 1BT +44 (0)1284 762081 www.smithsrow.org enquiries@smithsrow.org