30 Nov 2024
The Earth is an Hourglass, Curator Essay
Author: Reuben Keehan | Curator, Contemporary Asian Art
Dawn Ng’s multichannel installation The Earth is an Hourglass (2024) centres on one large screen documenting the time-adjusted melting of a pigment-infused block of ice, surrounded by smaller screens focused on details of the same dissolving block. The various screens are presented in deliberately monolithic frames suggestive of sculptural heft and pictorial depth, staggered through the space to encourage movement through a field of colour that extends from the videos to the treatment of the gallery architecture.
Installation shot of 'The Earth is an Hourglass', 2024.
Ng’s work across a wide range of contemporary media is unified by its use of subtle gradations of colour, which have come to function as a means for exploring the passage and experience of time. This aspect of her practice became pronounced during the production of Perfect Stranger (2018), an installation of prints in delicate hues featuring poetic text drawn from a daily, year-long correspondence the artist undertook with a psychologist she had never met in person. The durational character of this piece was then ‘fossilised’ in engravings on stone in the series Monument Momento (2018-2019).
Atlantis, 2019. Stone engraved, 4 x 46.5 x 46.5 cm.
Merry Go Round, 2020. Aluminium, Steel, Glass, Polyurethane Paint, 1850 x 1850 x 280 cm. Photo by Jovian Lim.
Ng explored tonal shifts of changing light as a register of time in the large-scale mirror installation Merry go round (2020), whose circular form drew on the widely circulated April 2019 astronomical photograph of a dazzling ring of compressed starlight around a supermassive black hole.
Similarly, Ng’s There is a window in my eye (2023) tracked the movement of light and colour at sunrise and sunset across a set of large, lenticular panels. Time is a black circle (2023) — a functional roller-disco — embraced memory and emotion by using specific colours to explore nostalgia through the popular design aesthetics of bygone eras.
Throughout this period, Ng has been fastidiously documenting stages in the disintegration of frozen blocks of coloured pigment in her ongoing Into Air series 2018 –, of which The Earth is an Hourglass is the most recent iteration.
Each of these multifaceted productions include three major outputs: a set of photographs Ng calls Clocks; timelapse videos entitled Time lost falling in love; and a series of paintings known collectively as Ash.
Nocturnal Highlands, 2024. Acrylic paint, dye and ink on watercolour paper, 145.5 x 144 cm.
To date, the artist has created more than 100 such works. Into Air involves creating large blocks of ice, each weighing around 60 kilograms, which undergo a three-week freezing process as Ng builds layers of strikingly coloured dyes and watercolour pigment within them. The finished blocks are photographed from multiple angles, and then documented through still and moving timelapse images as they melt, with the pigment captured on paper to produce paintings.
While the photographs and paintings might be said to freeze moments in the melting process, Ng’s Time lost falling in love videos compress the entire 20-hour process of decomposition into a mesmerising 40 minutes. With its multiple screens and field of colour, The Earth is an Hourglass expands the hypnotic effect of these videos into an enveloping visual experience that embraces multiplicity. The videos, each with its own duration and speed, play simultaneously, starting and stopping independently of each other, all in their own time.
Video documentation by Kenneth Lee
The work’s cosmic black ground and palette of oceanic azure and telluric rust, shocked with scarlet, magenta and yellow, is inspired by photographs of our planet taken from space.
For Ng the experience of time is elastic, as suggested by vernacular expressions such as ‘time flies’ or ‘watching something happen in slow motion’. As the collective title of her video works suggests, the experience of falling in love encompasses endlessly drawn-out periods of longing, encounters that pass too quickly and entire lives changed in instants – an almost black hole–like concentration of acute temporal distortions, played out by people everywhere, every day.
FURTHER READING
