Zoe Beaudry: Deep Time, Garbage Minutes

Each painting in this show is a kind of meditation on mortality and death. Together they form a series of scattered conversations between one another; a pattern of calls and responses realized over a span of five years. In this way, time is both a medium and a subject.

“Deep time” refers to the time scale of geologic events, which is vastly greater than the time scale of human lives. “Garbage minutes” refers to the final minutes of a sports game in which one side has an enormous lead, and the teams are playing out the clock without hope of changing the final result.

The recent works were inspired by Federico García Lorca’s poem Lament for Ignacio Sanchez Mejias, whose rhythmic chanting of “five in the afternoon” creates a cadenced flow that evokes the passage of time, as the writer elegizes a lost friend. Repetition creates a sense of continuity, of an unbroken pattern (opposed to the extreme discontinuity of endings and death). The idea of repetition as a meditative denotation of the passage of time is central to this work.