Take Your Time Exhibit

Take Your Time is the newest exhibit in the Osborne Family Gallery will be on view from August 26th to November 7th. The Osborne Family Gallery is open during the same hours that Criss Library is open.

About the Exhibit

I see the world not as one seamless world but as a world composed of other worlds, built on top and within one another. They exist harmoniously, bound not by space but by time. In an instant, I can move from one world into another where I can exist in two worlds simultaneously—in space, I am here. In time, I am there.

World-making is a conceptual process of seeing connections and making distinctions within our lived reality. It is a process of dividing and organizing parts into collections that represent different narratives. Only through suitable arrangements can we handle vast quantities of material and information. Time is marked off into seconds, minutes, hours, weeks, months, years, decades, centuries, millennia, eons, and so on. This way of ordering makes time comprehensible despite not being found in the world but imposed on the world.

Trains connect worlds. In looking at the railroad’s vast and interconnected systems of travel, commerce, telecommunications, and information, I perceive trains as meaning-making-logic-machines. Inspired by the train’s innate ability to signify time, order, and desire, trains function, on the one hand, as a visual apparatus through which to examine the many hyper-fragmented worlds, and on the other, as a structural device designed to bridge together disparate worlds.

This iteration of Take Your Time aims to reflect some of the complexities of contemporary experience. In Untitled Configuration No.1, a plethora of visual imagery collects on a segmented shelf, pointing to how we are bombarded with a constant stream of data that is often disconnected and difficult to process, yet remains on hand. In contrast, Untitled Configuration No.2, eleven framed photographs form a sequential whole, suggesting a sense of relative cohesion and continuity. By dialectically opposing these two configurations, the work explores tensions between order and disorder, fantasy and the real, the miniature and the large, and fragmentation and unification—all amidst the search for meaning in our temporally challenged world.

About the Artist

Terry A. Ratzlaff is an artist and educator living in Lincoln, Nebraska. His particular obsession with trains and time–and the point in which these phenomena collide–informs his current artistic research on time, vision, and modernity. Working primarily in photography and book form, his work emphasizes the sequence over the singular image to better deconstruct modern perceptions of time, history, technological progress, and its adversarial effects on human consciousness. He operates a small imprint, The Basement Window, making small edition artist books and boxes. He received his MFA from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and is currently Assistant Professor of Photography and Digital Media at Nebraska Wesleyan University.