Photo courtesy Bill Maynes Gallery, New York. . Art's space or site was once considered a neutral ground, without significant meaning. Similarly time has been taken to be benign. But time can also have meaning because memory and identity are time-based constructions and politically and culturally loaded. Memory hauls the past into the present where it floats, tethered only by mental strings to reality and real time.
Identity is an experience of the present self or others based on memory and the recorded past.
Lewis DeSoto's installations allow viewers to site themselves as obliterating shadow, anticipated observer or investigative participant in the myths, land and language of the Cahilla people who are his ancestors. Distance is both a journey to be made in time and a perceptual field of film loop images and fragmented objects where separation and dislocation from a personal and cultural self is both perceptual and real. Time is a construct, a territory mapped and measured, but time is also nothing and beyond calculation. Memory leaps into that infinite chasm in search of self and meaning, vision gets lost in it and just looks. Installation more than any other art form is linked to and acknowledges time.