ED ATKINS

At the center of the exhibition is a major new moving image work, Passive Mech, a timelapse film that documents the gradual deterioration of a cardboard stage set installed outside the artist’s family home in Zealand, Denmark. Shot from the window of his young daughter’s room at a rate of one frame per minute over the course of a month, the work’s 43,200 exposures and countless audio clips document both the greening turn from winter to spring and the structure’s eventual failure—each as indifferent to the other as they are inexorable. Our anticipation of the scene’s dramatic potential gradually yields to the absence of a protagonist and the corresponding pressures of growth and decay.

Included in the exhibition is a group of non-photographic works that similarly address the medium’s sentimental logic. Here, Atkins presents frottages that trade light for touch, unique prints pulled from a small selection of Passive Mech’s stills, and a series of personal photos mounted on forms made from family debris like cereal boxes and glitter glue. Addressing how objects and images simultaneously preserve and succumb to the moments they depict, Atkins examines the constructed and consecrated structures with which we buffer ourselves against change.