“And time altered for me. At first, as in childhood, it had stretched. The first spring had contained so much that was clear and sharp—the moss rose, the single blue iris, the peonies under my window. I had waited for the year to repeat. Then memories began to be jumbled; time began to race; the years began to stack together; it began to be hard for me to date things.”

—V.S. Naipaul, The Enigma of Arrival, 1987

“If Newton thought, said Austerlitz…that time was a river like the Thames, then where is its source and into what sea does it finally flow? Every river, as we know, must have banks on both sides, so where, seen in those terms, where are the banks of time? What would be this river's qualities, qualities perhaps corresponding to those of water, which is fluid, rather heavy, and translucent? In what way do objects immersed in time differ from those left untouched by it?”

—W.G. Sebald, Austerlitz, 2001

When DCAC Program Manager Jerry Truong invited me to serve as mentoring curator for the Curatorial Initiative this year, I jumped at the opportunity—in part because I love working with younger curators and seeing what interests them, but mostly because of what DCAC has meant for my own professional development.

In 2007, DCAC hosted Ian and Jan: The Washington Body School, a project that my collaborator Meg Mitchell and I used to weave a fairly ridiculous story about a fake 1960s Washington, D.C. arts movement.

The show marked not only my jump from painting to performance art, but also my realization that cultures of display and the white cube gallery experience could be used as creative media. Less than a year later, I would sit in a job interview and point to that show as my first successful curatorial project—despite the fact that it was in essence an elaborate practical joke.

But Ian and Jan was not my first encounter with DCAC. In 1997—a full decade earlier!—as a guitarist in a local punk band, I played a set for DC ArtBeat, a two-day visual arts and music festival held in DCAC’s theater and art galleries. At the time, my group had a rehearsal space in a then-very-different-looking Mount Pleasant; our older and wiser drummer, Tom Dobrov, had played in the ‘80s with mighty west coast bands like Whipping Boy and Oxbow. I can’t say that we were good, but we were well-rehearsed, brutally efficient, and very, very loud.

I came to DC in the mid-1990s determined to make music my life, but the band lasted less than three years, and by decade’s end, I had sold most of my guitar gear and gone back to school, pursuing an MFA in painting.

After my initial conversation with Jerry, my sudden vertiginous sense of time’s passage—of two prior lifetimes, decades distant, both marked by formative experiences in the same community arts venue—led me to consider how I might frame this exhibition. I also began to wonder how I might reconcile my abiding interest in music with my current work as a visual art curator.

Music to me is fundamentally a matter of time. Lyrics, melody, harmony: To me, these components are all subordinate to the telepathic dialog between a drummer’s right foot and a bassist’s right hand. The albums in my music library exist primarily as documents of musicians gathering in small rooms, sometimes relaxing behind effortlessly flowing pulses, other times pushing and trailing one another, lurching forward and falling back to create a nervous sense of provisional urgency.

If my interest in music is mostly formal and time-based, my relationship to the visual arts is anything but: As a curator, I love historical context, narratives, and theoretical explanations. I see my job as connecting artists to audiences via strong arguments and piles of information—and as a result, my shows tend to be text-heavy, larded with long interpretive labels, shelves full of books, and interactive response walls.

A Shared Sense of Time contains none of those elements. The six DMV-connected artists gathered here use sound to create relationships with elusive or nearly-invisible phenomena—asking listeners to sit with them wordlessly, and find and hold different rhythms, different ways of discovering embodied presence. My goal as a curator within this exhibition has been to try to create space for those experiences without indulging in monologues or explaining them away.

For this show, I would ask audiences to engage in what author V.S. Naipaul once described as “finding experience where I thought there had been nothing.” From plant biorhythms, captured via software and translated into shifting synthesized music and digital visualizations; to subtle changes in perception over many hours spent alone in a city apartment or a clearing in the woods; to the competing rhythms of two people’s heartbeats, echoed by the amplified sounds of falling drops of water: These experiences invite viewers to slow down, become quiet, and contemplate nature, states of interiority, and their own mortality.

I would like to thank Jerry Truong, Sean Elias, and Joe Kingery for their kind invitation and their support in developing this project. I also would like to thank curators Benedetta Castrioto and FAITH for joining me on many studio visits and ZOOM calls, serving as sounding boards, and helping me decide how to move forward at every step. I must thank my former student—and the new Gallery Director for Black Rock Center for the Arts—Joshua Gamma, who connected me to several artists, two of whom are in this exhibition. Finally, I must thank the artists—Sara Dittrich, Ledah Finck, Imka, Amy Reid, Joana Stillwell, and Davis Salisbury—for their incredible work, their boundless positive energy, and their willingness to join me on this whirlwind two-month adventure.