October 7, 2023 – January 14, 2024
Park Towne Place, Philadelphia
Curated for InLiquid
Overview
Material Time brought together five artists whose work considered the transformations that occur across radically different scales of time, from human use and decay to geological formation and environmental change.
Working with clay, soil, natural pigments, reclaimed plastics, salvaged wood, new media, and synthetic materials, Rebecca Schultz, Rachel J. Eng, Jazmyn Crosby, Jessica Demcsak, and Natalie Kuenzi examined the unstable boundary between the natural and the human-made. Their work moved between abstraction and representation, observation and intervention, inviting viewers to consider themselves not only as witnesses to environmental change but as participants within it.
The exhibition asked us to consider: how do we understand our own place within forms of time that extend far beyond a human life?
An exhibition inside an inhabited place
Material Time was presented at Park Towne Place, a historic mid-century residential complex on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway. The property maintains a permanent collection of more than 150 works by over 110 artists, while InLiquid curates rotating exhibitions and public programs throughout the four-tower complex.
The exhibition was embedded in residents’ daily lives while also welcoming a broader public through receptions, tours, and programming. That setting shaped my approach. The work needed to support sustained looking for an art-engaged audience while also creating points of entry for people encountering it as part of the place where they lived.
The exhibition also sat directly beside the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, one of Philadelphia’s most carefully designed cultural landscapes. I was interested in the tension between the exhibition’s consideration of ecological systems and the highly controlled version of nature visible outside the gallery windows.
Artificial turf extended through the galleries, visually pulling the green landscape of the Parkway inside. The choice deliberately heightened the artificiality of both spaces: a gallery filled with work about ecological change and a meticulously constructed urban landscape modeled on formal European planning traditions.
Against this exaggerated field of artificial green, the artists’ materials behaved differently. Unfired clay dried, cracked, and crumbled. Rocks spoke to visitors as they walked past. Soil carried the geological history of specific places. Reclaimed plastic and salvaged wood bore evidence of prior use. Augmented reality and interactive media complicated the distinction between physical and mediated experience.
Art, participation, and the making of the exhibition
Before the exhibition opened, artist Rebecca Schultz led The Art of Soil, an outdoor workshop at Penn Treaty Park along the Delaware River. Participants worked with soil gathered from the park and other Philadelphia neighborhoods, learning to transform local earth into watercolor pigments and using them to make their own paintings.
The pigments created through the workshop then became part of Schultz’s Timefulness, bringing material gathered and processed by community members into the exhibition itself.
Left to right: Rebecca Schultz, Timefulness: Fairmount Park, candid view from The Art of Soil
Interpretation beyond the wall label
I developed and designed a printed and digital exhibition catalog to give visitors a deeper look into the artists, materials, and ideas behind the exhibition. Distributed physically in the gallery and online, it allowed the interpretive framework to extend beyond a single visit.
All images curtesy of InLiquid
Clare Finin 