4.5 Billion Years

Brief Histories presents 4.5 Billion Years, a group exhibition with artists Ali Eyal, Himali Singh Soin, Jennifer and Kevin McCoy, Leila Seyedzadeh, Matthew Schrader, Sarah Anderson, and Simon Benjamin, opening June 7, 2023, and on view until July 1, 2023. Through a constellation of artworks, 4.5 Billion Years explores relationships between humans, land, and time, and the transformative power inherent in the inscribing of meaning into space.

Encounters with the earth's terrains, their ancient age beyond any comprehensible sense of time, radically rearranges space that is already under transformation: over geologic eons, volcanic eruptions protrude islands from oceans, and mountains and plains erode into vistas and fertile soil.

In the exhibition, artists survey and examine these symbolic and cultural meanings, mapping plant migration and dispersion, constructing imagined structures and forms that reference landscapes from the subconscious, and excavating core samples that reveal layers of social narratives. Beyond sedimented cultures, works also mine data banks of artificially generated images that provide the ephemeral pixelated surface to reflect back a reimagined world.

Through painting, sculpture, photography, and moving image, the works in 4.5 Billion Years unfold an ever-changing expansive natural terrain where past histories shape the present, bringing to light the dissonance between an unfolding natural topography and a politicized iconic landscape.

4.5 Billion Years is on view at Brief Histories from June 7 until July 1, 2023.