Gathered in the Stretching Now
Friday March 15th, 2024
7-11PM
On view March 15 - April 21 2024
Artists: Jenn Cacciola, Jennifer Tazewell Mawby, Taya Naumovich, Dana O'Malley, SK Reed
Gathered in the Stretching Now prompts an elongated sense of our present “now”, featuring work by Jenn
Cacciola, Jennifer Tazewell Mawby, Taya Naumovich, Dana O’Malley, and SK Reed. Here, time becomes a
malleable, textured, striated, and translucent material, used to encourage a reorientation of our personal senses of
history, future, and the space between. Methods developed by The Long Now Foundation serve as a unifying
framework among the artists. The Long Now is “the recognition that the precise moment you're in grows out of the
past and is a seed for the future. The longer your sense of Now, the more past and future it includes...” and as an
effect, the foundation hopes to “foster responsibility in the framework of the next 10,000 years” (Brian Eno).
Gathered in the Stretching Now includes large-scale installation, drawing, assemblage, painting, and mixed-media
sculpture.
In the exhibition space at Heaven Gallery, diaphanous oil paintings by Taya Naumovich seem to suspend
the viewer in dream states outside of a linear sense of time. Strangely familiar, translucent creatures inhabit the
space, each flickering with vividness between the present and memory, through shifting planes of color and light.
With similarly glowing scenes, Reed’s installations involving water-based painting and clay figures investigate the lost
kinship between self and the non-human world. Fluidity breaks down boundaries between subject and environment
in unexpected ways and encourages a re-centering and slowing down in resistance to Capitalism’s prescribed pace.
Similarly, O’Malley’s intimately-scaled assemblage works treasure slow looking and experiences of presence in the
“now”. Fragments of life’s daily residue and highly intuitive mark-making summon the changeless state of midnight’s
quietude.
Cacciola’s installations and sculptures consider a multi-layered arrangement of time, sometimes using
fossilized, frozen, and emerging birds as “ushers” across media. Materials and an index of symbols that draw notice
to membranes, surface tension, and looping remind the viewer of the simultaneity or echo between past and future.
Mawby’s larger-than-life oil pastel drawings and sculptures envelop female grief within the intimate gestures and
landscapes of human relationships, contextualizing community-building as an essential and alternative mode of
world building. Using the creation of personal origin myths, she explores how different forms of lineage can serve as
an extension of self through time.
In 2021, The five artists formed Peer 2 Peer (P2P), a curatorial collective that seeks to ground one another
and encourage slower looking, within an often dizzying art world. The group meets regularly online to offer
feedback and community with the twofold goal of reciprocally strengthening one another’s practices and
acknowledging the whole personhood of each artist.
