The Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts has a new exhibit, and it is about time. The exhibit “A Month of Sundays: Art and the Persistence of Time” explores several aspects of time and its effects on our lives.
While the exhibit’s theme is pinned to a universal experience, Curator Jennifer Jankauskas reminds us that the essence of time remains relative.
"Time is something that's so personal to everyone; how we experience it. And really elusive. It's hard to pin down. So in thinking about the exhibition, we wanted to approach it from all sorts of different ways.”
Central to the exhibit is a sense of intentional pause, or "slow time." [...] "We very rarely take the time just to be, and I think being in a museum, this is something that we hope people do all the time, that they come in here and interact with the works on view, not just in this exhibition but throughout the museum, and put a pause on their life.”
Duration is another tenet of time emphasized within the space: the time it takes to both create art and to absorb the work as an audience. To that end, AMFA invited artist Tim Youd for a performance piece, part of his 100 Novels Project.
Youd is on a quest to retype 100 novels, live, on a single sheet composed of two layers of paper. He does this at a venue tied to the book's history, using the same typewriter model as the original author. The resulting piece is a diptych that Youd says mirrors both form and essence.
"They are formal drawings. They are time-based drawings. They're made over time in a very specific way, and I see them as perhaps a metaphor for what happens to our brains when we read closely. Like there's something biochemically that leaves a mark inside of us, you know, somewhere in our brain, on some cells that we can kind of conjure up, but we don't necessarily remember all the words.”
For Youd, it’s a meditative exercise. These are books he’s read and which have shaped his worldview in some way.
"I want to spend time with that book. That doesn't mean I have to love it. It might mean that I have some questions about it going into it, but I have to feel like it is a book that was written with the intention of wanting somebody to really read it close.”
For his time visiting Arkansas, Youd is retyping Charles Portis’ landmark Southern novel, True Grit, both shaped by memory and the passage of time.
“True Grit is actually kind of a grim story that he allows us to experience by giving us plenty of deadpan, dry humor, that takes us through, sort of, this journey into Old Testament vengeance. And it is told, importantly, 30 years or so later by Mattie Ross when she is an older, middle-aged or late-middle-aged woman who's lived her life, a fairly solitary life, after this great adventure.”
