LUMINA OBSCURA

The Art of Jay Sims

 

[catalog entry]


Every Minute of the Future is a Memory of the Past

  • Date: 2016
  • Medium: Digital Photograph
  • Format: Pigment Ink Print, 19 × 25 cm

Every Minute of the Future is a Memory of the Past is a photographic meditation on time, presence, and haunting. A translucent veil of golden fabric cloaks a human skull, catching raking light and casting long shadows that fracture the image into temporal layers. The skull—originally a sculptural work by artist Samantha McCurdy—appears transformed by context and framing, recast here as both subject and symbol.

Light is central to the composition: it divides the image into planes of visibility and obscurity, casting a sharp silhouette across a textured wall while illuminating the veil in almost cinematic relief. The resulting tension between flatness and depth, material and spectral, creates a visual echo chamber—where shadow becomes form, and form becomes memory.

The title suggests a cyclical collapse of time: past, future, and present rendered indistinct. In this frame, memory is not retrospective but anticipatory; the image does not document a moment, but a condition. It is a still life, but also a scene from an unseen narrative—a moment held in stasis between recognition and forgetting.



Every Minute of the Future is a Memory of the Past

Every Minute of the Future is a Memory of the Past.

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