Kevin Townsend: chronotopic accumulation
About
Kevin Townsend’s exhibition isn’t so much an image, an installation, or a place — you’re looking at a duration of time. This field of marks, although simple on their own, even several per second, together mark two hundred hours of labor, focus, and entering a kind of reverie in this space. Townsend’s works of course vary in size and context, but the experience or process of making them is one of time.
Here time is always polychronic; a hotel lobby is a multi-tasking sort of place — it’s a site of constant change, a space where multiple time fields collide and upend any conception of a singular, universal timeline. Similarly, this drawing will accumulate as a sequentially layered series of marks. Over four distinct durations, Townsend will respond to his experience of the hotel, that is, that drawing is “made in the moment” rather than as a preconceived image. What might appear to be a carefully calibrated response to the architecture of the hotel, is a direct index of the energy of the room.
In this way, you can see marks thicken, lengthen, or densify as time thickens, more bodies gather, and distance themselves as the crowd clears. In Townsend’s drawing, one sees the charged and unfolding life of this place. Townsend’s four drawing periods will be open to the public and documented through photography and time lapse video. Visitors are encouraged to linger, take photos, and engage in conversation — Townsend intends for his process to be part of the life of the hotel.
Organizers
chronotopic accumulation is curated by Hesse McGraw, executive director, Contemporary Arts Museum Houston.