Mauricio Alejo

This exhibition is about time: time as a subject and time as a raw “material.” It is also about a future that never arrived. Taking as a starting point the photographic inquiries into movement by Eadweard Muybridge in the late 19th century and Harold Edgerton in the mid-20th century, Alejo proposes a dialogue between two fundamentally motionless media—sculpture and photography—to explore the contradictions and subtleties with which each unfolds, represents, and makes time inhabitable.

The exhibition refers to a historical moment when the idea of progress seemed to make sense—a moment in which our faith in the accumulation of power through technology promised mastery over natural phenomena. (Running horses, bullets piercing surfaces, explosions, athletes in action—these were the favored subjects of those photographers.)

The images to which Alejo refers carved into what had until then been an invisible world. By turning movement into a collection of discrete instants, those photographers also created the illusion of time as an object that could be possessed. In this way, time ceased to be something that implicated and sustained us, becoming instead another commodity to be conquered and controlled.

Nothing could be further from reality. This exhibition reflects on that future of mastery that never arrived. It nostalgically inhabits the impossibility of progress. Alejo speaks of the loss of direction and of the eternity contained in every instant.

–Curro