Anthony Lepore, I Yield My Time, 2022, Archival pigment prints, acrylic paint, and wood, 50 x 40 x 3 1/2 inches. Courtesy the artist and Moskowitz Bayse, Los Angeles.

Written by Michelle O’Malley

Edited by Parker Renick

Time is a taker. Objects change shape, shapes take new forms, and thoughts shift in composition. How did we get here, to this new point? We find ourselves blankly questioning, where did all this time go? Now we’re here, in this present moment, readying ourselves for time’s next victim.

L.A.-based artist Anthony Lepore’s latest exhibition, Time’s a Taker, features a series of photographic images that tactfully unveil the effects of time, using various objects displayed on wood frames as the subject of this experimentation. Each work in this exhibition examines time, symbolically freezing it and allowing viewers to pause and examine it up close, beyond personal perceptions. Through these works, time takes a more concrete, visual form. Though the concept of time is difficult to fully articulate in words, Lepore reminds us that photography can act as a loophole to this issue; visual repetition along with the pairing of images’ altered characteristics can reveal time’s consequences, as well as its inevitability.

I Yield My Time showcases a string of popsicles on shelves, the first in line frozen solid, then dripping slightly, and finally melting drastically into a mere puddle with two accompanying sticks. “Frozen popsicles must eventually melt if left outside,” we remind ourselves, but what if they didn’t?

Anthony Lepore, Nothing Burns Forever, 2022, Archival pigment prints, enamel, and wood, 66 x 32 x 3 1/2 inches. Courtesy the artist and Moskowitz Bayse, Los Angeles.

Nothing Burns Forever presents flickering fire encased in a cement enclosure where unaffected wood frames divide each recurring image in time; the flame dances in a slightly different form throughout each frame. As viewers, we cannot help but gaze at each of the flames engulfing every frame as we wait in anticipation for the fire’s eventual extinguishment, though we never see this moment, making us ponder time’s limitations. Nothing burns forever, but these repeated flame images challenge this natural concept.

Anthony Lepore, Days of Our Lives, 2022, Archival pigment prints, acrylic paint, and wood, 40 x 31 x 3 1/2 inches. Courtesy the artist and Moskowitz Bayse, Los Angeles.

Days of Our Lives shows grains of sand flowing from one frame into the next, the piles growing in number with each frame. The flow of the sand grains, the piles growing with every frame, bring an hourglass to mind, where the flow of sand from one glass compartment to another represents the passage of time, the emptying of one space signifying “time’s up” or marks the end of a period. Yet, in this particular work, the sand grains multiply with time rather than the expected emptying of one space followed by the filling of another. Here, time is endless.

Anthony Lepore, Working on Us, 2022, Archival pigment prints, acrylic paint, and wood, 66 x 58 x 3 1/2 inches. Courtesy the artist and Moskowitz Bayse, Los Angeles.

Lepore plays with time’s capabilities as well as photography’s power in capturing time’s decay. Photography is powerful in its ability to essentially ‘halt’ time, capturing moments through the documentation of specific points. Time, as expressed through photography, can move us and suspend us. As we re-examine our assumptions of time and take away new visual understandings of it with each of these works, we reflect on how much time has passed us just while pondering it. After all, time is a taker; it brought us to this point.

Anthony Lepore’s latest exhibition, Time’s a Taker, is on display at Moskowitz Bayse in New York City until May 7, 2022.

Photo Editing by Lenin Arache