Maya Kramer: In the Time It Takes: Shanghai

Capsule is pleased to present In the Time It Takes, Maya Kramer’s (b. 1977, Washington DC, USA) second solo exhibition at the gallery. For over two decades, Kramer’s practice has investigated how humans perceive, inhabit, alter, and are shaped by the natural world. Through paradoxical deployments of material and form, she reconstructs environments to foreground intangible processes, overlooked phenomena and untold histories. In earlier works, copper pipes in abstracted forms reminiscent of bodies alternate between states of frost and thaw; an empty window view hung on the wall is perpetually shrouded in a mild rain; a cheapened cardboard facsimile of the blue sky is brought literally within reach. Kramer uses a poetic visual language to unsettle the quotidian and make the world appear, for a moment, strangely unfamiliar.

In this latest exhibition, her paintings, sculptures and installation extend this speculative way of looking at the ‘natural’ world while reflecting both human and geological timescales, as well as the range of activities that have taken place within them and shape our lives. Continuing her on-going exploration of the environment, the works in the exhibition are developed around a specific place, refracting common conditions and patterns of the human-nature relationship. They emerged from Kramer’s expedition to the Norwegian Arctic archipelago of Svalbard in 2023. Encounters with fossils, exposed geological strata, and glaciers layered with ancient ice offered a palpable sense of the Earth’s deep time. Yet this experience of the distant past was entangled with an acute awareness of the present, an immemorial landscape shadowed by the urgency of rapid environmental change. The works do not attempt to reproduce the particular locale so much as to use it as a point of departure for conveying the tension between contrasting perceptions of time—between awe and apprehension, permanence and change, and the immensity of geological time and the immediacy of the present.

As the first piece one encounters in the exhibition, the painted-aluminum sculpture Ashes (2021-2023) distills an organic energy. Billowing upward, the form assumes an airy and kinetic quality that contradicts its material groundedness. Its surface is tinted in a fluid spectrum from faint purple to vivid flame yellow. Cast from tree bark and reconfigured into an abstracted plume, the work evokes a future fossil: a fragment of life frozen in a moment of transformation–elapsed, yet enduring as a trace.

A similar reconstruction of nature is amplified in the immersive environment of the exhibition’s second room. In the installation, floor-to-ceiling wallpaper envelops the space, its indigo-blue surface patterned with repeating digitized images of fossils realized through the cyanotype process. Against this vast field, sculptures resembling rocks are displayed on shelves in a specimen-like arrangement.

The images of fossils spread across the walls like a constellation, colliding celestial and telluric dimensions within the exhibition space. What appears distant and cosmic is at the same time botanical and geological—a record of life forms that existed long before the human eye could have witnessed them. Kramer’s representations are not a straightforward mimesis of the environment. Rather, they present a puzzle whose very displacements and misrepresentations offer clues to unravel it.

Against this expansive backdrop, the sculptures recreate the peculiar “bread rocks” of Svalbard–a type of slate that, fractured by geological pressure, forms into sections that can be separated and fitted back together. Reimagined in plaster and clay, the sculptures are remarkably convincing in their appearance, texture and weight. Yet this apparent material similitude gives way as soon as the sculptures are opened.

While some sculptures appear as solid, blank or inscribed rocks, others consist of strata that unfold like the pages of a book. Yet what they offer is anything but a complete account. Inside are scattered pieces of information: barely legible texts, broken images, and bas-reliefs of fossils, interspersed with blank surfaces.[1] Nothing quite resolves into a continuous narrative. Instead, the viewer is left with clues—to geological time, to vanished forms of life, to the history of whaling and coal mining, and to the human presence within the landscape. The work promises to be read, but can only ever be partially deciphered. Disguised as a collection of geological specimens, it gradually reveals itself as a kind of archive, in which human history occupies only a few pages of a much longer story.

The artist overlays complex perception of time and place in the exhibition’s eponymous series of paintings, The Seafloor in the Sky (Kollerfjorden),[2] Illusion of an End (Meyerbukta), and It's Always Been There, if Changing (Isbukta),[3] where she conjures a synesthetic recollection of the glaciers and snowfields.  While the works' imagery recalls the heroic and sentimental vocabulary of nineteenth-century Romantic landscape painting, their surfaces are incised with topography and wind patterns generated through mapping and data-collection technologies commonly used for purposes ranging from tourism and resource extraction to climate-change research. 

The markings, rather than applied on the surface as illustrations, are manually engraved into slowly accumulated strata of paint, mirroring, in miniature, the processes through which the landscape is formed and transformed by geological forces, human activity and climate change. The result is a deliberate collision of ways of seeing. The atmospheric and the empirical, the remembered and the measured, the sublime landscape and the data set occupy the same surface. In Kramer’s paintings, different forms of knowledge overlap, interrupt, and obscure one another, prompting reflection of the land as scenery, resource, and a force that both shapes and is shaped by human life.

In the Time It Takes is a meditation on the radically different scales of time contained within a landscape. The rocks and fossils that recur throughout the works summon a timespan measured in eons; the maps and records of research and extraction derive from a much shorter, yet profoundly impactful, human history. Between them lies the present moment, increasingly defined by the urgency of a shifting environment. The artist highlights ways in which the land is always signaling while also weaving in human perception and land use, creating a perplexing tale of humans and their habitat.

Maya Kramer’s participation in the Arctic Circle Residency was made possible through support from various entities within NYU Shanghai, including the Shanghai Key Laboratory of Urban Design and Urban Science (LOUD), the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA), and the Office of Research.