A POINT IN TIME // Ein Zeit – Punkt
Abigail Reynolds creates the illusion of being in multiple times and or places concurrently. She works with historical sites depicted in photographs taken from old mass-produced books. By splicing two or three photographs together very precisely, a collapse of time is effected. The varying textures of the images, the layers and folds promise to give access to the past and at the same time deny it. The past is unfolded before our eyes while we are actually closed out, unable to reach the past we thought we were being pulled into.The concept of time and “point of view” play an important role in the artists work. In her own words: “…I slice apart …rooms, building on the rupture of consumption” and she weaves “one photographic space across another” in her cuts. The structures before us still exist today, allowing a feeling of timelessness in the repeated shapes of the folds that first seem to cover and hide but ultimately revealing the complex depth of the meaning of time.The doubled images are an entirely new approach. The cuts the artist von creates respond to the images in a very specific way. They are necessarily geometric and function to preserve as much of the image as possible: because the images are folded to project upwards all of both images can be simultaneously present. This is particularly important in her thinking about the universal now – the simultaneous presence of two moments.