ARTISTS
Lisha Bai: Here Now
鈥淭he sands of time鈥� is surely an overused, even needlessly melodramatic, idiom. But of all materials on earth, sand is uniquely suited to make time visible. Hourglasses aside, sand鈥檚 particulate form bears witness to geologic time. Its smoothness and smallness is the result of millennia of erosion and weathering of quartz, aragonite, coral, and shellfish. Given time, sand accumulates and lithifies, turning back into rock (aptly called sandstone). Geologists say that half of all quartz sand grains have completed this sand-to-rock cycle at least six times.
Lisha Bai has been working with sand for over a decade. In her first sculptural experiments with the material, she fashioned it into slender columns and block-like cubes reminiscent of Minimalism鈥檚 bare austerity. Yet the sand鈥檚 crumbly texture, the way it made the edges of each of her objects uneven and crater-like, fused staid monumentality with informal disintegration. The works evoked the precarity of the timeless: things that seem fixed are bound to fall apart.
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鈥淭he sands of time鈥� is surely an overused, even needlessly melodramatic, idiom. But of all materials on earth, sand is uniquely suited to make time visible. Hourglasses aside, sand鈥檚 particulate form bears witness to geologic time. Its smoothness and smallness is the result of millennia of erosion and weathering of quartz, aragonite, coral, and shellfish. Given time, sand accumulates and lithifies, turning back into rock (aptly called sandstone). Geologists say that half of all quartz sand grains have completed this sand-to-rock cycle at least six times.
Lisha Bai has been working with sand for over a decade. In her first sculptural experiments with the material, she fashioned it into slender columns and block-like cubes reminiscent of Minimalism鈥檚 bare austerity. Yet the sand鈥檚 crumbly texture, the way it made the edges of each of her objects uneven and crater-like, fused staid monumentality with informal disintegration. The works evoked the precarity of the timeless: things that seem fixed are bound to fall apart.
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