Time Is A Fire
Langdon Graves
January 25 - March 9, 2024
Opening Reception: Thursday, January 25, 6-8pm
Address: 242 West 22nd Street, New York, NY 10011

Dinner Gallery is proud to present Time is A Fire, an exhibition of new works by Langdon Graves. This show marks her third solo exhibition with the gallery which opens January 25th and will remain on view through March 9th with an opening reception on January 25th from 6-8pm. 

Deepening her interest in storytelling and myths, Time is A Fire presents Graves’ most intimate body of work to date. This new series of sculptures and drawings delves into explorations of time and self-identity to address nuanced and often paradoxical sentiments that surface surrounding familial legacy and societal expectations of women, particularly those that grow louder at middle age.

Graves borrows the show’s title from Delmore Schwartz’s poem, Calmly We Walk through This April’s Day, wherein he presents time as a relentless and fleeting force that shapes our lives. Before delivering the poem’s last line: time is the fire in which we burn, he offers: time is the school in which we learn, suggesting that before it consumes us, time is a teacher. Graves skillfully builds a space between these two relationships with time, incorporating symbols of memento mori typical of her oeuvre with greater complexity as reminders of mortality coexist with signs of resistance to time’s immutability. Citing the small but rich universe of her backyard as the source for much of the imagery, Graves uses what she observes within its nature as an entry point to better understanding her own. 

Embracing a deeper palette, Graves invokes the vespertine hour when evening darkens into night, unlocking a quiet orchestra of symbiotic relationships that often go unobserved. Sharing a bird motif with several works, the isolated nest in the drawing Double Clutch presents its contents like a jewel box as an avian thief is caught in the act or perhaps being used to steal them. In How did it get so late so soon? It’s night before it’s afternoon, Graves’ anthropomorphic birdhouse gently extends a finger as a perch while a clock’s hand pierces through the skin. Here, time is visceral as a human body interfuses with the clock in order to control the hours it points to.  

Throughout the work, inanimate elements develop sentience while the living things grow towards artificiality, allowing them to be eternal. Moths gather daintily around a glowing lantern in Eclipse with one pinned to the wall as though for preservation, raising uncertainty as to whether any of them are living. In Keep Away From Children, the last match in a book stretches and slinks from a drawer to escape being lit or to prolong the time it has to burn. The drawer, a nod to previous work and family lineage, combines those from three generations of kitchens - her own, her mother’s and her grandmother’s - for a kind of time capsule of objects, memories and behaviors that may be intentionally saved, or hard to get rid of. Inside the drawer is a freshly extracted wisdom tooth, which Graves describes as “a root to my ancestry, an heirloom that connects my body to my family’s bodies.”

Meticulous construction and a trompe l’oeil approach to materials render these multimedia works as models performing the objects they represent.  Wood carefully crafted by hand, stands in for wrought iron and plastic, brass becomes paper, string and insect wings. Made at human scale, the objects are enlarged miniatures for someone who might play house rather than making one. Graves’ complex symbolism explores liminal spaces that fluctuate between real and surreal, light and dark, internal and external. They serve as reminders of the beauty and overlooked possibilities born from the release of societal and self-imposed standards and discovering one’s own path.  

About Langdon Graves
Langdon Graves (b. 1978) is a Virginia-born, New York-based artist who holds a BFA from Virginia Commonwealth University in Painting and Printmaking and an MFA from Parsons School of Design. She has had solo exhibitions in New York, Florida, Virginia, Arkansas, and Massachusetts and has participated in group shows throughout the United States, Europe and Australia. Langdon has attended the Stoneleaf Retreat Residency in Hudson Valley, the Fountainhead Residency in Miami, the Kunstenaarsinitiatief Residency and Exhibition Program in the Netherlands, the Object Limited residency in Bisbee, Arizona and is a recipient of Canson & Beautiful Decay’s Wet Paint Grant. Langdon’s work has been featured in Art in America, VICE, Hyperallergic, Juxtapoz, Art F City and Blouin Artinfo.