Véronique Plesch – Introduction Spring 2026: The Shape of Time

Art not only communicates through space, but also through time.

—Robert Smithson

For this issue of the Maine Arts Journal, as we asked our contributors to reflect on how they handle the challenging task of giving visual shape to the immaterial and fleeting notion of time, we borrowed the title from a ground-breaking book, George Kubler’s The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things. Originally published in 1962 and in print since, the Shape of Time represented a ground-breaking way of conceiving art history—and change in particular—by suggesting that the quest for solutions was its driving force. As indicated in its subtitle, Kubler (1912–96), who specialized in Mesoamerican and Latin American Colonial art and archaeology, advocated expanding “the idea of art . . . to embrace the whole range of man-made things, including all tools and writing in addition to the useless, beautiful and poetic things of the world.” The Shape of Time remains Kubler’s most influential book, its lasting impact felt by scholars in many disciplines regardless of their specialization, but also—and importantly for us—by artists (in this issue, Mark Wethli remembers John Baldessari recommending the book at a lecture in 1979). Kubler himself, reflecting upon his book’s reception twenty years after its publication, noted its resonance with artists such as Ad Reinhardt (who reviewed it in ARTNews), Robert Morris, and Robert Smithson. As a matter of fact, Jarret Earnest notes that Kubler’s book “reverberates throughout Reinhardt’s writing” and that his daughter recalls “her father buying many copies of The Shape of Time to give to younger artists who would be receptive to it, including Robert Smithson.”

This issue’s contributors evoke a myriad of times—both experienced and represented, quantifiable and ephemeral; from the primordial to the geological, the time of human presence on earth and that of history. There is the ancestral and individual time, that of a human life and that of personal memories. We hear about cyclical, iterative, accumulative, fluid, and simultaneous time. It can move slowly or fast—too slowly or too fast. Time can feel special or routine, it can be regimented and controlled, or liberated and free-flowing, the time of creation or of necessary chores.

Against the constant demands of life, Grace Hager sees the process of making art as a way of getting rooted in the present; for her, time is cyclical and elemental. At the same time, she knows that “something is truly happening in the studio” when time becomes “fluid—sometimes moving more quickly and sometimes seeming to stand almost completely still.” Although for Hager, time plays out differently in painting and in ceramics, her work in both media is “united through a sort of agrarian time developed in response to the elements of nature.” Her paintings and ceramics tackle the challenge of suspending “awe-inspiring moments.” In her ceramics, the feat is enhanced by the fact that she gives three-dimensional and material shape to immaterial phenomena like the rays of the sun.

For Edgar Allen Beem, Nick Benfey’s “multi-dimensional landscapes play with time and space in thoughtful and amusing ways.” Beem reviews works recently shown at Elizabeth Moss Gallery in Falmouth, paintings in which “more than one plane of existence can be seen simultaneously.” As Benfey merges vistas grasped at different moments, he draws from his Quaker faith to capture what he calls his “daily experience,” in which “a physical space and a mental space,” observed and remembered sites, and exterior and interior views converge into what Beem calls “the Eternal Now.”

In her photographic and assemblage work, Caroline de Mauriac engages with the Anthropocene’s deep time, drawing “on the tenuous relationship between the human and the other-than-human world.” She ferrets out—and forces us to take notice of—the “nearly indelible marks of a manmade environment,” examining “insidious” artifacts like World War II watchtowers and bridge debris that are destined to outlast their creators. These inorganic intruders’ “uncomfortable permanence” clashes with “the cyclical nature of organic landscapes,” suggesting that human time is a mere “snapshot” against the vast, “life-death-life” spiral of the planet. Countering these ruins’ longevity, Mauriac photographs her Assemblage in the Wild installations and then removes them, “leaving no trace.” By listening to “stories from the unfiltered voices of nature,” she seeks to “learn from the land about a shared planetary future.”

Claire Millikin provides a close reading of a bronze sculpture by Passamaquoddy artist Gabriel Frey, shown at the 2025 Biennial at the Center for Maine Contemporary Art in Rockland. In this small bronze, an Indigenous man is poised between two doors that allegorize the notion of “time as a door we are always stepping through.” The man is at once contemporary and historical, concepts that Millikin unpacks, showing how the work “ironizes and combats . . . time-bound misreadings of Native American history and reality,” while calling attention to the “[m]iscued temporality and temporal dissonance [that] are intrinsic to the way that mainstream American culture interprets Native Americans.” For Millikin, Frey’s man “is an impresario beckoning the viewer to be aware of the intermingling of past and present” and the sculpture “articulates the double-time of survivance.”

Carl Little’s interview with Ellen Golden explores the “sum of a lifetime’s worth of experience” that informs her intricate ink drawings. As Golden discusses her perception of time while working, her practice, and her choice of tools (from the dip pen to the Rapidograph), she explains that her work is an accumulative and physical practice of “seeing and contemplating the world.” This “sequential” labor imposes its own temporal limits; the demanding physicality of her painstaking drawings means she can “do . . . five or six hours at a time” before her wrist starts to hurt. For Golden, art is fundamentally a process and “[m]aking art is a way of getting grounded,” which, far from being an escape, is “a way of ultimately remaining engaged in the world.”

Véronique Plesch considers Gary Green’s five decades of photographic practice and the ways in which his work engages with the notion of time. From early photos capturing the “now” of the punk scene in the New York City of the ‘70s and ‘80s, to the timelessness of the Missouri Prairie and Maine trees, to the Long Island of his childhood, Green’s “quiet photos” explore the marks of passing time in elegiac meditations on time and memory—a “past that cannot be regained.” There is also a forward-looking dimension to his work as he documents the fate of a post-industrial town he now calls home. We read about Green’s dedication to “the importance of looking attentively—even at unremarkable sites,” and of his “commitment to repetition” and an iterative practice that finds its ultimate manifestation in the book form, whose sequential organization “guides the viewer through a particular narrative that unfolds over time.”

Just as photographer Green has spent a career looking, poet Stuart Kestenbaum contemplatively observes the cup made by a potter friend from which he drinks his morning coffee. His meditations lead him to connect the cup’s shape, its surface, and its very matter to the outside world, noting that “[t]he clay, eroded stone and organic material . . . remembers the slow geologic time of tectonic plates and the ice shields. It knows the freeze and the thaw and the endless flow of water. And the clay remembers the fire, the flames that touch its surface and draw oxygen from the glaze.” The potter himself, whose hands shaped the cup, is connected to the potters who came before, reaching back to “prehistoric makers” and an ancient lineage of skill that makes the act of drinking a “morning blessing” where the landscape and the clay are one.

In this quarter’s “Art Historical Musings,” Véronique Plesch examines how time is grasped by artists and art historians, beginning with the limitations of “periodization” and “master narratives” that overlook history’s varying speeds. She explores how artists represent the spans of human life, civilizations, and sacred history, noting how anachronistic details “blend temporalities” and how visual strategies control the beholder’s gaze and the time spent taking in the work. After discussing how sequential moments capture the passage of time, she concludes with the modernist shift toward “simultaneity,” where measurable units give way to a subjective, ever-changing “duration.”

For our “Insight/Incite” column, Lynda McCann-Olson looks back on a thirty-three-year career as a visual arts educator shaped by the pursuit of “rabbit holes.” In particular, she recaps her exploration of Asian pictorial traditions and how doing so allowed her students to envision “the timeless appeal and valuable incorporation of other world views.” What began as a simple brush painting activity evolved into a comprehensive East Asian curriculum and a lifelong commitment to cultural diplomacy. McCann-Olson details her journey from a workshop at the University of New England to the schools of Aomori, Japan, exploring the pedagogical shifts required to teach Sumi-e and Notan to Maine students. She shares what she learned traveling to Asia and the gains made from what she implemented in her classes back home.

MAJ Poetry Editor Betsy Sholl selected works by three poets. First, Brian Boyd memorializes Mexican muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros as he was serving a sentence at Lecumberri Prison for his political activism. Boyd’s poem at once recalls a photo by Héctor García Cobos and a linocut by Arturo García Bustos, conflating the moments each capture, and thus giving way to simultaneous actions of the artist’s hands. Sholl’s introduction underscores the urgency of Siqueiros’s legacy and how Boyd’s poem shows “a man of his times becoming, in a sense, timeless.” Next, Claire Millikin reflects in two poems on the passing of time and memories that return like ghosts on a cold night. The metaphor of the record (and of record stores, now a thing of the past) alludes to our futile attempts to crystallize memories. That memories—or time—cannot be arrested is at the core of Millikin’s second poem, in which she declares: “The way time shifts in its wrapping / a gift disarrayed on opening.” Finally, for James McKenna, who also evokes the fluidity of time, memories are transfigured—and reorganized, just like the puzzles in his poem. We hear about jigsaw puzzles “always at least a 1000 pieces, / always classical art” that occupy the space where the missing father should have been. The paintings featured in the puzzles, a stabilizing force against the chaotic time of moving six times in four years, reappear within the pages of a beloved college art history textbook (look no further, it’s H.W. Janson’s History of Art!).

In the first of this quarter’s four Members Showcases, Alice Spencer reflects on the “shape-shifting” nature of time, describing how the COVID pandemic, despite its tragedy, granted her “a gift of time”: studio time ceased to be scarce and at odds with other obligations, and she had instead “time to dive deep, to stay submerged, to move seamlessly from one day to the next without losing my place in the work.” In contrast to the intentionality once required to maximize her studio time, she found that “unscripted time” enhanced her creativity. Audrey Parker draws on local flora to evoke the passing of time and infuse her watercolors with symbolism. The day lily, whose blossom “only lasts a day before withering away,” is for her an emblem of “energy and confidence,” while the fern stands for “renewal and new beginnings.” Donald Patten also saw his life and work impacted by COVID. He turned to the lessons of the past and of old masters “to depict the embodied experience of trauma.” In his charcoal drawings, at once humorous and poignant, we see famous works of art visited by people wearing masks: past and present intermingle.

In our second Showcase, Mark Wethli recounts attending a lecture that John Baldessari delivered at Cal State Long Beach in 1979, in which Baldessari recommended George Kubler’s book (see above for the importance this book played for many contemporary artists). In a memorable coincidence, Wethli jotted the title on a piece of scrap paper that happened to be a photocopy of the title page of Ben Shahn’s The Shape of Content. This fortuitous encounter convinced Wethli to read Kubler’s book; the insights he found in it “have inspired [his] path ever since,” most notably informing his 2007 sculpture, Piper Cub. Ann Tracy discusses her relationship to time and the way the year appears in her “mind’s eye,” visualized in a remarkably spatial manner. Memories coalesce in her digital collage, Time Slows in a Cemetery, in which she alludes to the elasticity of the passing of time and incorporates photos of her own reflection while viewing Christian Marclay’s twenty-four-hour film, The Clock. Arthur Nichols contributes results from life-drawing sessions—sketches of short warm-up poses layered on a single sheet. As a result, “the superimpositions represent movement and different poses over several minutes,” and the drawing documents “the passage of time.” Nichols’s gestural marks are records of activity; we sense both their speed and the duration of the pose. Holly Kidder’s life-drawings stand at the other end of the spectrum, both in their precise naturalism and the “many hours of slow looking” required for each. Kidder notes that they are “an amalgamation of many moments documenting the experience of looking closely at somebody who is always subtly changing.”

Our third Showcase opens with Jemma Gascoine’s poignant account of creating an urn for her father’s ashes. Gascoine traces the arc of this daunting project—from her father’s initial request to the final vessel—mapping a journey that spans a few years and the Atlantic, moving between a living room in Surrey, England, and her studio in Monson, Maine. Her narrative captures a resonant intersection of time and place, where the “Herculean task” of making meets the reality of mortality and loss. Jennifer Lee Morrow’s work similarly “serves as a type of journal that records [her] time in the studio,” documenting “the thoughts, emotions, and objects” that inhabit the “time of making.” The intricate materials and techniques in her mixed-media piece, Our Time, bear witness to a complex and time-consuming process. By combining elements created decades ago with imagery from the 15th-century Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry, Morrow collapses time into a single frame, where Zodiac signs and clock parts meditate on the persistence of memory. The symbolism of time continues in Ann Thompson’s assemblage, which also employs clock parts. Appropriating the idiom “the eleventh hour” as its title, Thompson’s piece addresses the acute urgency of the present moment, confronting the multiple “eleventh hours”—environmental, political, and existential—that define our time. Finally, Betsey Foster’s encaustic painting—a technique naturally suited to express the “Shape of Time” through its succession of layered strata—delves into geological history. Her work captures the surface and texture of a large piece of granite pegmatite, where schorl inclusions suggested to Foster the image of “humans marching across the bridge of time.” Through her lens, the ancient mineral becomes a metaphor for the brief, collective human journey.

Our final Showcase brings together the “never-ending” cycles of loss and legacy. Charles Kaufmann revisits the site of a watercolor by Charles Ewing. Eighty-two years later, just a few weeks before a historic Maine storm obliterated the relics from Ewing’s time, Kaufman paints his own watercolor and observes the marks of time: an “old dirt road, moss-covered stone walls, lightning-shattered white pines, and a neglected boathouse,” along with “the skeleton of the large wooden boat.” For Amy Ray as well, art making is synonymous with temporal exploration. With her textile assemblages she aims to reveal layers of history, heritage, and ancestry; for her, living by the ocean means being aware of the marks left by storms and lightning strikes, forever inscribed into the landscape. Mildred Bachrach meditates on mortality, our lives’ finitude, and our fate. Mirroring the theme of her photograph, she leaves the door open as she concludes: “I have no answers.” Finally, Ave Melnick seizes a “decisive moment” from a heat wave in Paris. Melnick’s snapshot succeeds in capturing “the moment of joy and movement that evoked the spirit and sense of the place and time.”

With this issue we launch an exciting new feature. Right Now! Processing the Moment, is the opportunity for our contributors to voice in visual form their response to our present times. Don’t miss this massive eclectic selection of studio and street art! In other time-sensitive news, Edgar Allen Beem reviews András Szántó’s The Future of the Art World (Berlin: Hatje Cantz, 2025), a collection of thirty-eight interviews addressing the current state of the art world. ARRT! and LumenARRT! file their quarterly reports, UMVA President Joanne Tarlin recounts the Union’s accomplishments and plans for the future, and the UMVA Midcoast Chapter announces a forthcoming exhibition (Bodies in Motion, opening 1 April in Camden).

As is our custom, we conclude with Tony Owen’s exploration of the UMVA’s past. As his archival discoveries take us back to the destruction of the Library of Alexandria, First Amendment battles surrounding Robert Mapplethorpe’s The Perfect Moment exhibition, Tiananmen Square, and Avy Claire’s Valentine Project to the US Senate, Owen suggests that history is a “crooked path.”

Although time is unpredictable, indomitable, and unconstruable, it is both a foe and a friend, an ally, a source of revelation and of creation. This is what Johann Melchior Füssli expressed in a pen-and-ink drawing in which the winged figure of Time unveils a naked woman who reclines next to ancient ruins. Although Old Father Time holds his scythe, he is not only personified as the Destroyer, for he is accompanied by two putti who hold the instruments of artistic creation: a mallet, an L-square, and a palette and brushes. Füssli’s drawing affirms that “Tempus Omnia Manifestat”—Time reveals all—while its subtitle explains that this is an “Allegory of Art and Knowledge.” Here, Füssli counters the more common phrase of Tempus fugit, time flies, recalling George Kubler’s The Shape of Time, where he writes:

Why should actuality forever escape our grasp? The universe has a finite velocity which limits not only the spread of its events, but also the speed of our perceptions. The moment of actuality slips too fast by the slow, coarse net of our senses. The galaxy whose light I see now may have ceased to exist millennia ago, and by the same token men cannot fully sense any event until after it has happened, until it is history, until it is the dust and ash of that cosmic storm which we call the present, and which perpetually rages throughout creation.

 

References

Kubler, George. The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things. New Haven: Yale University, 1962.

Earnest, Jarrett. “Ad Reinhardt and The Shape of Time.” The Brooklyn Rail January 2014.

Reinhardt, Ad. “Art vs. History.” ARTnews 64.10 (1966): 19, 61.

Smithson, Robert. “The Artist as Site-Seer; or, a Dintorphic Essay.” In Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings. Ed. Jack Flam. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996. 340–45. Quote is on p. 342.