Stalagmites

What happens to our memories when they fade? Or when mundane objects bring them into vivid colour again? What is transformed? 

Through the repeating motif of an antique clock, Peter Kohut explores questions about grief, time, and memory. Clocks have appeared in works throughout art history (Salvador Dali’s The Persistence of Memory, Christian Marclay’s The Clock, and Antonio de Pereda’s Allegory of Vanity come to mind), symbolizing mortality, time, and its mutability. In this vein, Kohut’s clocks hover in a colour field made mysterious by their apparent lack of solidity, shadow, or source of light. They exist in a non-space, imaginary, or conjured in the mind. They hover with the weight of time as gravity pulls the pigment down, eroding form and detail, much like the erosive forces of nature: rain, wind, tide. In these clocks, there is no tick-tick-tick, no time-telling hands. They remain silent, slowly and inevitably dissolving, leaving an accumulation of passed time. 

A stalagmite, an accumulation of calcium salts deposited by dripping water, is like the naturally occurring lower-half of an hourglass. These works stand like stalagmites, prey to the inevitable drip, dissolution, and build-up of sediment, which both erodes and creates their form. The clock drips, dissolves, and slowly disappears. Our lives then, over time, become a series of accretions and erosions of experiences lived and remembered.