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Artworks
Untitled (Temple of Time), 2020
Oil and acrylic on archival printed canvas94 1/2 x 132 3/8 x 1 5/8 in
240 x 336.2 x 4 cmFurther images
In this work, Firelei Báez overlays brightly-hued, painterly gesture onto a chronological chart of world history by Emma Willard entitled 'The Temple of Time' (1846). Emma Willard was an American...In this work, Firelei Báez overlays brightly-hued, painterly gesture onto a chronological chart of world history by Emma Willard entitled "The Temple of Time" (1846). Emma Willard was an American women's rights activist dedicated to education, who wrote several textbooks on history and geography throughout her lifetime. In this source document, Willard rendered a new perspective on time in multiple dimensions, exhibiting nations both ethnographically and chronographically in an attempt to render a total history of knowledge in time. Drawing visual cues from science fiction, Báez uses mark-marking as a means of intervening within the map's atypical representation of time—in relation to space, "sovereigns by which the age is chiefly distinguished," and figures of ideological influence. Imploding its composition with a vibrant fissure, Báez further complicates linear and reductive approaches to understanding the past, to generate new possibilities for the future.
