Rainey Straus: Spinning Time into Form @ Gallery Route One

Spinning Time into Form brings together unfurling, seed-like sculptures alongside suspended assemblies that map the energetic signatures of Bay Laurel and Live Oak trees at Point Reyes National Seashore. Crafted from cast paper, papier-mâché, bioplastic, pine needles, and cheesecloth, these forms carry traces of time, growth, weather, and decay. Their titles — Treeing, Entangling, Spiraling, Unfolding, Seeding, Drifting — are all present-tense verbs, deliberately so. These are not objects so much as processes caught mid-motion.

The work is in conversation with philosopher Karen Barad's interrogation of quantum physics — not as illustration but as poetic response. Our dominant culture is built on a belief in fixed, discrete objects, a belief that underlies much of our extractive relationship to the living world. These sculptures propose something different: boundaries that shimmer rather than hold, matter that is always already in relation.