Blueprint of Another Time

Across history maps have signified certainty and its limits. Measurement produces power, earth becomes territory, and through cartography, an order of things is codified. Until: it is contested, trespassed, refuted, redrawn and reimagined. Today, machinic opticality allows a greater degree of control over measurement —live satellite feeds replace measurement by foot, cosmic phenomenon is shrunk to the size of phones, and what resides beyond the realm of light under the sea can now be viewed on our oblong, incessant screens. These technologies of capture generate ever new reams of data to be analysed and understood, yanking at us to keep apace. Against this storm of “progress” that rampantly erases worlds of knowing, the artist turns to gaze at the wreckage of our pasts. In Blueprints of Another Time, maps now obsolete and assigned to erasure, are salvaged by the artist as not relics, but living documents—containers of a past that albeit silent, has more to say. In turning to discarded, forgotten maps, the artist reshapes the relationship of time and terra—using haptic, multisensory and speculative ways of navigating old routes. Time turns tensile. No longer linear—it can loop, spiral, rupture to produce infinite fractals, conjunctures, and confluences. Such radical formations emerge from periods of extensive research and the study of natural and cosmic phenomenon, from dark matter, geological forces and glacial time to magnetic fields and the chronicle of the sky. These acts of peering through instruments of knowing—such as telescopes—leads the artist to more mystery and doubt, drawing her to that which resists sight, that which is steadfastly invisible, unknowable, refusing all attempts at edification except storytelling, fabulation. The artist asks the questions which the archive cannot accommodate. What happens to an absent star? Is the land an unruly clock? What binds matter, and what releases it?

Against the seriality of timekeeping and the conceits of linearity, the works presented here warp and weft varied durations—often folding journeys, passages, cyclical and diurnal movements upon one another; compressing hours, decades, minutes into the alchemy of printmaking—a process that submerges temporal residue and indexical trace within hybrid chronologies. Places appear as resonant spectres, tracing a disparate geography that is defined by the personal—the artist’s trajectories into the stories that are held in almanacs of matter. Foliage, stone, monument, river—each hold imprints of routine, departure, wandering, and return. In vivid cyanotypes, aerial maps of fields are drenched with the affective charge of colour, transformed into a prismatic, ineluctable sight. Time gathers on the surface of drawings that feature dense, rhizomatic marks connecting as arboreal and astral forms, illuminated with layers of subterranean metals and cosmic debris—silver and gold—with the former transforming in exposure to air. The drawings weave various cycles of entropy, transformation, and regeneration—as each substance passes through arcs of being and ceasing to be. Blueprints of Another Time is a compass to the invisible yet eternal, that which must be found through a devotion to sensing the score that every being leaves on another, however infinitesimal, however evanescent its vibrance—from the cosmic to the granular.

Arushi Vats