Beyond the Instant

Oct. 4th – Oct. 20th, 2019

Opening Reception:
Friday, Oct. 4th, 7 -9 PM

Curated by Ilona Golovina

The Royal @ RSOAA is pleased to present, Beyond the Instant a group exhibition curated by Ilona Golovina featuring the work of Vera Saldivar De Lira, Jean Marie Casbarian, Drew Leventhal, Stephanie Cortazzo, and Maddalena Arcelloni.

Beyond the Instant combines the idea of the immediateness of polaroid film with a lifelong journey of self-reflection and observation the world around. Each of the five artists have worked their way around the straightforwardness of instant photography and transformed it into a continuous experience of art.

An instant is an infinitesimal moment in time, a moment whose passage is instantaneous.

The continuous nature of time and its infinite divisibility was addressed by Aristotle in his Physics, where he wrote on Zeno’s paradoxes. The philosopher and mathematician Bertrand Russell was still seeking to define the exact nature of an instant thousands of years later.

In physics, a theoretical lower-bound unit of time called the Planck time has been proposed, that being the time required for light to travel a distance of 1 Planck length. The Planck time is theorized to be the smallest time measurement that will ever be possible, roughly 10⁻⁴³ seconds. Within the framework of the laws of physics as they are understood today, for times less than one Planck time apart, one can neither measure nor detect any change. It is therefore physically impossible, with current technology, to determine if any action exists that causes a reaction in “an instant”, rather than a reaction occurring after an interval of time too short to observe or measure.