Sage Sohier: Passing Time | Joseph Bellows Gallery
Sage Sohier © Passing Time - Belle Glade, FL - 1981 - 79-06
Written by Makenna Karas
Photo Edited by Kelly Woodyard
“Time moved more slowly,” explains photographer Sage Sohier about the world that her latest exhibition pulls you into. Set mainly in the working-class, American towns of the early 1980s, “Passing Time” interrogates the dimensions of a bygone era, where kids played out in the streets and a sense of community hung effortlessly in the air. Having revisited the negatives and contact sheets that comprise this collection over the pandemic, Sohier noticed a raw theatricality to the images that told a story of the streets. On display at the Joseph Bellows Gallery, the exhibition invites you to witness that theatricality through April 27th in San Diego, California.
Sage Sohier © Passing Time - Chelsea, MA - 1983 - Summer 1983 61-05
Pointing out that this was an era largely devoid of air conditioning, Sohier explains that people lived more communally, spending their days outside, living in front of one another. “Dania, FL” offers a glimpse into that world with its playful display of adolescents hanging out in a front yard on what feels like a Saturday morning. No one is directly speaking or sharing eye contact. Each person appears to be lost within their world, yet they are together. They are connected. The image invites you to share that comfortable sense of community that has long since become a rarity in our socially-distanced contemporary society.
Sage Sohier © Passing Time - East Boston, MA - 1983 - Towns MA - Summer 83 38-06
Equally foreign to the modern viewer is the slow pace of life in which the collection is drenched. When you look at “Chelsea, MA,” you can almost hear the eerie echo of the dusty streets that a single woman stands smoking in the center of. Unlike an image that might be made on a chaotic metropolitan street corner, this shot beckons a level of slow awareness for the finer details. You have space and time to pay full attention to every detail.. As with many of the images in this collection, there is also a sense of having invaded a moment. The woman’s posture is relaxed, her gaze caught up somewhere in the distance, adding a dimension of voyeurism that makes you feel like you have been dropped in the middle of someone else’s life.
Sage Sohier © Passing Time - Pittsburgh, PA - 1983 - PA 83-05
Invariably, nostalgia simultaneously stains the collection in hues of melancholy. “Illinois” presents a young girl standing by a mailbox on a country road, waiting. Standing on the brink of adolescence in a quiet, rural town, the shot is a microcosm of the feeling of waiting for life to begin. A touch of grief for a simpler, slower way of life lingers in the frame, inviting us to remember an era we will never know again. It is an ode to the stiller moments of living that get lost as we grow up and launch ourselves into the rat race of a much different world. Interested in excavating the archeological ruin that the past becomes in our minds, “Passing Time” invites you to linger for a moment longer in that time that has long since evaporated from reach.
Sage Sohier © Passing Time - Pittsburgh, PA - 1983
