Lynn Silverman: In A Matter of Time | Reception
Wednesday, September 10 :: 6-8pm
@ Goya Contemporary
Goya Contemporary Gallery is pleased to present In A Matter of Time, the third solo exhibition by internationally acclaimed photographer Lynn Silverman. This compelling body of work invites viewers to contemplate the intersection of memory, time, and photographic materiality through Silverman’s evocative engagement with vintage panoramic photographs.
Silverman’s recent work draws upon scroll-like photographs discovered while sorting through decades of materials within various archives. These images—group portraits of early 20th-century schoolchildren, summer campers, banquet attendees, and military recruits—were originally captured with large-format panoramic cameras. Recovered from obsolescence, they serve both as subject and object in Silverman’s conceptual, transformative investigations.
“Given the relationship a photograph inevitably has with the past, my desire is to focus on the act of remembering. The contortions of the scrolls—the twisting, curling, and blurring during exposure—mirror the fragility of memory,” explains Silverman. “My manipulation of the scrolls attempts to evoke how the gap between the photograph and memory continues to widen as the time when the picture was taken recedes further into the past. This is also true for the near-obsolete technology used to make these panoramas.”
In the studio, Silverman unfurls, rotates, and re-illuminates the photographic scrolls, sometimes exposing both recto and verso, thereby revealing handwritten inscriptions or signatures otherwise hidden from view. In select works, she introduces motion during exposure, allowing gesture and time to permeate the photographic process.
“These strategies simultaneously collapse and expand sequential registers, blurring the line between image, object, and remembrance” notes Amy Raehse, Director and Curator of Goya Contemporary. “Through Silverman’s deliberate and nuanced handling, the curled edges, folds, and shadows of the photographic scrolls assume sculptural and temporal qualities, which she then re-interprets through the lens of her own camera and darkroom-based studio photography” she continued. “The resulting images are at once meditative and disorienting—echoing the ephemeral nature of both memory and analog photography.”
In A Matter of Time continues Lynn Silverman’s decades-long exploration of perception, impermanence, and the phenomenology of seeing, reinforcing her position as a significant voice in contemporary photographic practice.
Silverman’s work has been exhibited internationally and is included in major museum and private collections. In 2025, Silverman was awarded a New York Public Library Picture Collection Fellowship through the Wallach Division of Art, Prints, and Photographs. This prestigious fellowship supports artists and scholars in the research, development, and/or execution of new creative or scholarly work based on the Collection’s holdings.
In conjunction with Silverman’s exhibition, the artist and Goya Contemporary Gallery have partnered with Liz Faust at The Silber Art Gallery, Goucher College, to present a special screening of Silverman’s collaborative single-channel video, Between Death and. A separate press release will provide additional details about this unique cooperative screening.
