Katie Paterson exhibited work at Princeton University Art Museum’s group exhibition entitled Time’s Relentless Melt. This exhibition presents photographic time-based works that center around the complex nature of time, and the tension between transience and permanence, recording and remembering. Paterson’s work will exhibit alongside artists including Andy Goldsworthy and Dawoud Bey.

Photography relies on a tension between ephemerality and permanence as it captures a moment before it is lost. The writer Susan Sontag explores this phenomenon, and the inescapable movement of time, when she writes of “time’s relentless melt” in On Photography (1977). Like timekeeping devices such as calendars and clocks, photography defies the fluid nature of time, briefly suspending it. In 2020 the COVID-19 pandemic similarly created a rupture in the sense of time’s passage as it halted daily routines and social interactions and upended clarity about the future. The photographic and time-based works in the exhibition Time’s Relentless Melt consider the multifaceted nature of time, which can be linear, cyclical, disjointed, or compressed.