Valeska Soares: Broken Year, Alexander Gray Associates, New York, NY,
Conceived during the isolation of the COVID-19 pandemic, Broken Year is Valeska Soares’s meditation on time suspended and reshaped by crisis. Structured as a monumental calendar, the installation unfolds across a gallery-wide grid of linen canvases, each marking a day between March 1, 2020 — when the artist began self-isolating — and March 29, 2021, when she received her second vaccine dose. On every panel, Soares affixes pages from books bearing resonant phrases, transforming language into a fragile register of lived days.
Minimal in form yet emotionally expansive, the repeated grid conveys the strange simultaneity of monotony and rupture that defined the pandemic. Its accumulation suggests both the weight of passing days and a quiet mourning for lost time and lives.
Minimal in form yet emotionally expansive, the repeated grid conveys the strange simultaneity of monotony and rupture that defined the pandemic. Its accumulation suggests both the weight of passing days and a quiet mourning for lost time and lives.
Installed nearby, Ouroboros (2014) offers a counterpoint: a golden pocket watch slowly rotating once per hour, stripped of its hour hand and thus of its ability to measure specific moments. Referencing the ancient symbol of the ouroboros — the serpent devouring its own tail — the work evokes cyclical, infinite time. Together, Broken Year and Ouroboros trace an arc between intimate, daily experience and vast, continuous duration, inviting reflection on memory, loss, and the shared human condition of living through time.
