Sarah's Project Statement: now and then is an ongoing, multi-part transmedia project that has assumed forms including lecture essay, a series of recorded conversations, original text compositions, and slideshow presentations of images.
the project is centered around notions of archival fluidity and futurity and a sustained engagement with the artistic output and archival materials of the photographer Alvin Baltrop. artistic and academic research methodologies have informed an exploration of the re-frames that collaborative dialogue might assume, with multiple possible pathways of access to and from it.
now and then, at the river’s edge:
cross temporal collaborations
now and then encompasses performance lecture and nonlinear narrative as means by which I give form to the artistic research that I engage in. These forms of artistic output are also integral research methodologies within my practice. One thing becomes another, then shifts again: it is a practice of fluidity. For me, the art resides not in objects or in images, but in the dialogue that can be had around these. My practice is one in which transformation is always occurring, where the realization of a work is not understood as a fixed point or state but is instead proposed as multiple encounters and shifting dialogues over time. I constantly re-present, re-embody, re-enact, and re-produce subjects, themes, and work.
now and thenIt starts [[here]]
A conversation that depends on being recorded and re-recorded to reach realization. recordings of recordings of recordings – a practice in archiving that renders the original ever-present, though perhaps at times, increasingly faint.
the project does not propose to provide answers of any sort. its primary aim is to produce further questions.
how shall we travel from here to there?
we can also go back and forth in time, from now to then.
understand, all of these times are really all happening all at once - it seems that the river is some sort of dividing line,
between water and shore (here and there),
but this has never been true. the space we inhabit is expansive, boundless. there is no dividing line, not really. the liminal space between one and the other is an endless in-between. and from the placeless space we can see every grain of sand: all of the shores, each vanishing speck a point in the endlessness. we can go anywhere; we can see whatever shore(s) we wish to see, any time at all.
would you rather see this shore in
[[1975]]
or remain (for now) with me in
[[2023]]
the other option (at the moment) is to consider the nature of [[linear time]] furtherthe piers are near collapse.
in this active twilight is
a euphoric ruin of the built environment;
a potential place with a strange liberatory power.
at work here at day's end there are at least three (but most likely more)
each obsessed by their own work,
unaware of the others.
should we visit first the one who is
[[wearing a mask]]
or the one who is
[[suspended from a harness]]
or the other, who
[[cuts a hole in the side of the structure?]]
and not far from here is another allusion to the past of this place
another [[day's end]]
golden under the setting sun, soaring over the water, tracing its own remains into the sky.
only steps from the remains of pilings,
this is not the exact duplicate of [[Pier 52]] nor does it attempt to be. it is a recollection in the air that renders the past it represents curiously both absent and present.
the place where these points on the timeline converge is the hudson river and the ruins of the piers that once stood there:
there are people whose paths intersect here (not literally)
overlapping, intersecting
(pasts, presents, and futures);
there is no place to begin or end, it doesn't matter where in the river we enter.
we always have to enter from [[the water's edge]] one is taking a series of photographs of himself and others wearing a mask around the city.
the images seem unutterably sad, oddly expressive especially since the facial features of the mask never change.
if you'd like we can [[consider the mask behind the mask]] or alternatively, we can return to [[the water's edge]] above the waterline, above [[the water's edge]] this is probably the one intervention that makes the least sense to revisit.
except for the temple it made of the light and the water: the gilding of the ruin.
it's another chance of sorts to [[consider the mask behind the mask]]
or at least to linger here awhile longer with the shape of time, and [[retrace its outline]] we'd have to conceive of time in another way completely in order to step outside of the constraints of linear time.
what if while here we felt more than ever the rush of specters across and within time(s) and sensed more deeply the eternity of every moment. all these “nows,” all along the timeline, have the possibility to converge and intersect, to be reclaimed and re-embodied, at some unimaginable future-present.
in undreamed-of futures.
do these references to which we return again and again, these conversations that slowly continue, the past that we reclaim, the now that is the vehicle by which we traverse time in linear fashion, move us in the direction of the imagined, the potential, the impending?
how do we move past [[here]] ?across the street, someone else assembles a mask and a camera,
the form is the same,
the meaning is different, and the same.
we'd have to cross west street to get to
[[Pier 52]]
if we want to see
[[day's end]] againwhat happens when the artist [[cuts a hole in the side of the structure?]]
it's impossible to retrace it all.
but years and years later, someone else comes along who will [[retrace its outline]] in the sky
this didn't all happen in one day, of course
it happened in one place: a place always and never in motion
a paradox
[[the hudson river]] again, and again, and again.
move past this insistence regarding [[linear time]] from what vantage point is this place best seen?
how is the view, aloft, when
[[suspended from a harness]]
one which offers an entirely different quality of light from the beams that appear
when someone else [[cuts a hole in the side of the structure?]]
we would be there together,
if only we could really bring ourselves to truly disbelieve in [[linear time]]
Sarah's Artist Statement: Sarah bricke is a transdisciplinary artist, writer, and researcher. she is primarily concerned with the ways in which seemingly disparate landscapes, bodies, and processes are both distinct and inextricably linked, and how these paradoxical relationships are represented, perceived, and preserved through institutional and archival practices.
her practice merges research, scholarship, materials, mediums, and modes of production in ways which serve to trouble dominant narratives and existing orders and structure. she is interested in radical processes of rethinking, re-embodying, and re-imagining. working through installation, objects, photographic processes, performative lecture, critical theory, and poetry, bricke engages in the production of objects and images as a mechanism to facilitate dialogues around them: she is involved with making as a continual process in which things don’t become fully defined and can’t be considered completely understood or fully realized.
she believes that biographical content is largely unnecessary and generally uninteresting. alternatively, this placeholder for formulaic recitations of academic degrees, artistic achievements, and prestigious awards offers an opportunity to test parafictions and substitute narratives.