Cody Trepte
Anna Meliksetian and Michael Briggs are pleased to present From Both Moments As Another, Cody Trepte’s first exhibition with the gallery.
On its surface, time seems a simple notion, the passing days measured in seconds, minutes and hours, but these man-made constructs are merely approximations of the earth’s rotation around the sun. In the exhibition, Trepte proposes a different idea, that time be measured as change — one moment morphing from present to past, replaced by another from the future transformed into the now. Moments, marked by difference, become the most basic unit of time.
From Both Moments As Another consists of photographs, drawings and prints. The photographic images in the exhibition, created from found photos of anonymous ruins, have been manipulated and rotated using a computer program written by the artist. Fusing these mechanical processes with the hand-made, the photographic prints are layered with ink drained from thousands of ballpoint pens over the course of several months.
The bronze colored ink creates a mirror-like surface that reflects an imperfect image of the viewer and the surrounding works.
Also included in the exhibition are text-based drawings that are made with bleach. The drawings will slowly change over the course of many years as the bleach alters the surface of the paper. As a result, each drawing is imbued with its own crude measure of time. The phrases in the drawings, depicted in overlapping italic and regular typefaces, point to subtle slippages in our experience of this phenomena.
The installation will change several times over the course of the exhibition, creating informal chapters. With each turn, selected works will be replaced by printed facsimiles that document their previous iteration, which then provide a backdrop for the new installation. This layered effect gives form to a temporal collapse of the exhibition itself: a work’s past coexisting with its present and prefiguring its future.