Artist Statement

Nothing exists in isolation. There are literally trillions of large rocky masses in our solar system, all of them orbiting around the galactic center. They reflect time scales of hundreds of millions and billions of years. Whether holding small earthbound rocks and stones in our hands, or viewing giant orbiting asteroids through a telescope, we have been fascinated by these geologic objects as seeds and keepers of time. 

Few of us have any concept of the enormous timescales in our planet’s long history. Rocks help us chart the planet’s past. What seems like an inanimate object, rocks can become a living seed of time that enables us to look and see our place on that time scale in a new way. The lifespan of Earth may seem unfathomable compared to the brevity of human existence, but understanding the rhythms of Earth’s deep past can give us perspective.

To many physicists, while we experience time as psychologically real, time is not fundamentally real. The notion that time is segmented into the past, the present, and the future is unhelpful and even inaccurate. Time does not pass, time simply is. Time is a social construct we use to navigate and better manage our lives. At the deepest foundations of nature time is not a primitive, irreducible element or concept required to construct reality. These days we find ourselves living in a world of unfolding and becoming in the present, and less in a world reflecting on the past or projecting into the future.

Our series of paintings explore how we fit into the Earth’s history. We wonder if our conception of time affects the way we think and behave as we process the mysterious flexibility of time. These many moving parts of the galaxy or the planet creates tension as they connect or collide. Tension creates the gift of knowledge and creates energy where we engage and learn.

 – Chuck Hoffman + Peg Carlson-Hoffman