Sarah Grew

Visual Expressions of Time

For these temporal paintings I have sifted through art history to find the many ways the passage of time is expressed visually. So far, I have focused on six modes of temporal expression:

• Stillness, or deep time, the horizon of sight and time, limits/limitlessness.

• Light, reflection, refraction, both as a captured static element and as an active part of the metal paintings.

• Motion, creating a sense of movement in the stillness of paint.

• Repetition/punctuation, or counting moments on a timeline, in my work I use the EKG.

• Memory, the suggestion of landscape symbolized by the horizontal line. Sometimes I also incorporate photography as an anchor, an actual memory as well as its fabrication.

• Degradation of Materials, purposely using materials that will change in time, creating art that appears static but speaks to time.

Currently, I am painting on steel where I use the reflective surface to create constantly changing paintings. These paintings redefine what a painting is through their state of flux. They play with time, light and motion as well as stretching our notions of how paintings behave.