Art on Hulfish | Time's Relentless Melt

Hiroshi Sugimoto 杉本博司 (born 1948, Tokyo, Japan; active Tokyo and New York, NY), Imperial, Montreal, 1995. Gelatin silver print; 42.2 × 54 × 0.6 cm (frame). Courtesy of Bruce Silverstein Gallery, New York © Hiroshi Sugimoto / Courtesy of Hiroshi Sugimoto

“To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. . . . All photographs testify to time’s relentless melt.”​

—Susan Sontag, On Photography​ 

When the writer and philosopher Susan Sontag refers to a photograph’s capacity to freeze a moment in a person’s life and simultaneously document time’s unrelenting movement, she explores ideas that can also apply to the strange experience of time during the COVID-19 pandemicwhen most of us faced disrupted daily routines, an upended view of the future, and a rupture in the sense of time’s passage as a reliable means by which to mark a life. Time’s Relentless Melt  presents photographic and time-based works that grapple with time as multifaceted—linear, cyclical, disjointed, or compressed—and explore the tension between transience and permanence, between recording and remembering. Works on view include Katie Paterson’s visualizations of cosmological time, Andy Goldsworthy’s performances with nature, and Dawoud’s Bey’s commemorations of lives lost.

Art on Hulfish is made possible by the leadership support of Annette Merle-Smith and by Princeton University. Generous support is also provided by William S. Fisher, Class of 1979, and Sakurako Fisher; J. Bryan King, Class of 1993; the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, a partner agency of the National Endowment for the Arts; John Diekman, Class of 1965, and Susan Diekman; Christopher E. Olofson, Class of 1992; Barbara and Gerald Essig; Rachelle Belfer Malkin, Class of 1986, and Anthony E. Malkin; the Curtis W. McGraw Foundation; Jim and Valerie McKinney; Tom Tuttle, Class of 1988, and Mila Tuttle; Nancy A. Nasher, Class of 1976, and David J. Haemisegger, Class of 1976; Gene Locks, Class of 1959, and Sueyun Locks; H. Vincent Poor, Graduate School Class of 1977; and Palmer Square Management. Additional supporters include the Humanities Council, the Lewis Center for the Arts, the Africa World Initiative, the Program in African Studies, the Department of African American Studies, and the Center for Collaborative History.