Unhooked from Time

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Nicole Gordon's Asylum is one. A large pen-and-ink-on-Mylar depiction of some aristocrat's creepy reception hall, complete with totem poles, elk trophy, and roly-poly penguin creatures, the work does not really speak to the curator's claim that we've "artificially hooked ourselves to linear digital time," but so what? A piece like Asylum caters more to visual pleasure than conceptual gimmicks.

Having said this, much of the show does relate to the theme of time, often metaphorically, on occasion in a more literal sense. Joshua Ray Smith, for instance, juxtaposes photographs of old wooden doors whose scarred and weather-warped planks are missing their hinges with what appear to be the actual hinges below them. We thus get a sense of both the physical and visual effects brought to bear on manufactured objects by the passing years. Charles Jevremovic's Wall of Circuit Board Panels achieves something similar, since nothing signifies the rapid pace of technological obsolescence more than a bunch of broken circuit boards. Compared to the tiny electronics that feed our miniature computers today, these panels of transistors and wires look giant and ancient, like the remnants of some long-forgotten civilization (the 1980s).