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.

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Tags: Chicago, Dana O'Malley, Gathered In The Stretching Now, Heaven Gallery, Jenn Cacciola, Jennifer Tazewell Mawby, SK Reed, Taya Naumovich, West Town