Time Management Techniques

Sept 24, 2022–Jan 8, 2023

A slightly warped black and white image of a busy street with people walking along the sidewalk and cars in the intersection.

Time Management Techniques showcases photography by artists who examined the medium’s relationship to time between 1968 and 2019. Drawn from the Whitney’s permanent collection, the exhibition features many recent acquisitions alongside works that have never before been exhibited. Each of the artists, despite employing vastly different techniques, aesthetics, and conceptual frameworks, works against the immediacy often associated with photography to reflect a passage of time that is slowed down, expanded, or nonlinear.

Some artists employ a personal archive, reaching back into their individual and familial histories to challenge the linear way stories are often told. Others use photography for its self-referential properties, recording the duration and labor of making photographs and allowing the process to dictate the final form. Still others consider performance and photography together, using the camera to mark a moment and suggest countless more that remain uncaptured. By making works that reflect on varieties of duration, all of these artists reveal the slipperiness of time and articulate the artificial ways we attempt to divide, mark, and come to terms with its passing.

This exhibition is organized by Elisabeth Sherman, Assistant Curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

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To make his series, The Land Describes Itself (2019), Sky Hopinka—a member of the Ho-Chunk Nation and a descendant of the Pechanga Band of Luiseño Mission Indians—took his photographic transparencies of landscapes in the Pacific Northwest, the Southwest, and the Great Lakes region and layered them on an overhead projector, obscuring and recombining them to make their original references unrecognizable. He then photographed these new compositions with a digital camera and scratched a line of poetry into the final print.

Sky Hopinka, The outside being here right now, 2019, from the series The Land Describes Itself. Inkjet print with hand-scratched text, 13 × 13 in. (33 × 33 cm). Edition 2/3. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase with funds from the Photography Committee 2021.78. © Sky Hopinka
Sky Hopinka, This is eidos and caprice, 2019, from the series The Land Describes Itself. Inkjet print with hand-scratched text, 13 × 13 in. (33 × 33 cm). Edition 2/3. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase with funds from the Photography Committee 2021.80. © Sky Hopinka