'One Second Per Second' by Alumna and Professor Dana Lok '15 on Display at PAGE (NYC)

One Second Per Second by visual arts alumna and Adjunct Assistant Professor Dana Lok ‘15 will be on display at PAGE (NYC) from September 12 to November 1, 2020. Lok’s series of paintings explores the heavy complexity inherent in the metaphor “time takes up space.”

Lok’s exhibition draws on the strange, confounding ways many people have experienced time following Covid-19 quarantines this past spring. In a PAGE (NYC) press release, Lok describes time’s paradoxical, textured quality amidst the pandemic: “It seemed to flow erratically. Days moved like mud, but months rushed by. Surely something was slowing down or speeding up. But to say that time flows gives it an imagined physicality that leads to all kinds of absurd questions about concrete properties that it does not have. If time flows, what does it flow through? Which direction is it going? And how fast?”

Lok’s past work has also delved into the space between the theoretical and the tactile. Words Without Skin, Clima Milan (2019), reveals the metaphorical as material: lies become failing organs, signs transform into symptoms, and clarity is considered good hygiene. Minds Mouth, Bianca D’Alessandro, Copenhagen (2018), unpacks a sensory synthesis of vision, touch, and taste: “A gesture can be sliced like butter. Frames of time bear weight and slump with gravity. Looking at something might get your fingertips sticky. Viewership requires cutlery.”

In Soft Fact, Clima, Milan (2017) and The Set of All Sets, Chewday’s, London (2016—2017), Lok’s work mines the parallels between a painting and a theater set. Lok investigates how both visual art and theatrical performance inevitably depict only a sliver of their subjects. Viewing takes place from a particular perspective, in a particular moment of time: “...the paintings and drawings in this show entertain the idea that pictures can have properties usually attributed to statements: they can be true or false, they can mislead, and they can make promises.”

After receiving her MFA from the School of the Arts, Lok went on to the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. In 2016, Lok was named a Sharpe Walentas Studio Program Resident, and in 2018, she was a Rema Hort Mann Emerging Artist Grant Awardee. 

One Second Per Second can be viewed in person, with masks required for entry, on Saturday and Sunday from 12—6 pm, or during the week by appointment.