Temporal Embodiments 
Sharon Servilio & Sylvie van Helden

February 21 - March 30, 2019

Opening Reception and Artist Remarks Thursday February 21, 6-8PM

At the core of this exhibition is a lingering and disquieting question about how we relate to our daily experiences of the world. In today’s climate of technology-soaked mediations of daily life, how can we understand time, and how do we slow down time so that we can pinpoint it, or take from our perceptual life a moment or concept of significance? These are questions that artists Sharon Servilio and Sylvie van Helden address in Temporal Embodiments.

The experience of time has become increasingly fragmented, leaving us ungrounded; and unbound to a sense of a greater cosmic timeline. Through their work, these two artists see the idea of time as a linear series of unrelated moments as a construct that can be broken, slowed down, and pulled into a greater, unmediated notion of eternal time, released from the pressures of endless scrolling and constant sensationalism. Servilio and van Helden work to ground or embody the cosmic and unfathomable within the earthly, fleeting fragments of individual moments.

This takes different forms visually for each artist. For Servilio it is a constant aspiration to present a more complete picture of the world within the physical space of paper: “I collage, fold, and weave a visual universe where galaxies can intertwine with clocks, rugs, arteries and artifacts, and wallpaper is as three-dimensional as any object.” Her colorful and playful objects and figures in paper reference and represent time, but time as just another spatial plane or dimension—time embodied.

Sylvie van Helden on the other hand creates multilayered collaged paintings using images that she finds on Instagram. Searching terms that evoke spirituality, she collages the resulting source images into a Mandala form. The Mandala is a symbol and tool used in several religious practices to focus a practitioner’s attention and aid in the process of meditation. Van Helden’s evocation of this symbol is her embodiment of a greater idea, the notion of the cosmic or universal, and her filtering of an Instagram search through this symbol is her way of slowing down the fast moving feed of easily discarded information, anchoring it to one grounded place.

Temporal Embodiments is an exhibition that asks us, implores us to slow down, to consider the world as a place both deeply connected and deeply fragmented, to consider time-as-continuum against time-as-fleeting, irretrievable moments. How do you experience the world, and what remains of those experiences, what is your Temporal Embodiment?

Images:
Sharon Servilio, Blue World, 2016, gouache on paper construction, 49.5 x 49.5 x 6.5"
Sylvie van Helden, #atone, 2018, acrylic and collage on panel, 8 x 8"
Sharon Servilio, Drove All Night, 2016, gouache on paper construction, 23 x 29 x 7.5"
Sylvie van Helden, #cultivate, 2018, acrylic and collage on panel, 40 x 40"

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