Time's Elasticity
A day in conversation with Pattie Smith's year
This week I met Pattie Smith in a Garden in Osprey, Florida and I realized that this work, her music, her words have always worked to show us what is here, what is gone and what is Gone Again.
Patti Smith has always understood that time moves differently for artists and feelers. The same punk poet who gave us Horses. A Book of Days, and Just Kids approaches photography with the same intuitive grasp of rhythm and pause that marks her music and writing. Her camera becomes another instrument for capturing what she calls “the inward quality of a moment”—those instances when linear time bends, when a single day can contain months of feeling and months can collapse into the memory of an afternoon.
This particular photographic exhibition traces a year through twelve countries, each month anchored to a different place on the map. It’s a meditation on how geography and time intersect, how the camera can hold both the immediate and the eternal.
Walking through her year-long journey in the span of an afternoon, with patterned butterflies fluttering like time, I felt a mix of delight and recognition of myself in relation to two other women who tried their best to speak to a moment in time.
It feels like I’m often trying to find my way toward this recognition and community with others.
The exhibition asked me to consider how days can feel like moths: fragile, drawn to light, fluttering between darkness and illumination with an urgency that makes minutes feel geological. And how months, in retrospect, can compress into single images—a quality of light, a gesture, the way shadows fell across a particular threshold. The way an image can make you feel winter beneath the heat of the summer sun.
March | Mexico
Standing before Pattie Smith’s dedication to my birth month to a place I’ve never been in a garden. I felt that a displacement that comes when art dissolves the personal into the universal. March in Mexica through Smith’s lens feels familiar, even if the landscape is foreign. I’ve know this ladder. It’s mine and not mine.
The Adobe Studio | Breathing Walls
“Everything in the adobe studio in Abiquiu breathes of Georgia O’Keeffe. The surface of the walls, the ladder, the surrounding landscape, and the dry bones beyond.”
Georgia O'Keeffe spent many summers in New Mexico before deciding to live and die there. She made Abiquiu her permanent home in 1949 and lived in New Mexico for the rest of her life, dying in Santa Fe in 1986.
Smith’s words on the exhibition plaque capture something essential about how place holds time. O’Keeffe’s presence still inhabits those walls decades after her death, the way artistic vision can saturate a space and make it permanently alive. The adobe breathes with the accumulated weight of attention, of someone who looked at bones and flowers and sky with such intensity that witnessing became a form of permanence.
Separate Growths | Same Source
On the path between galleries, I encountered three trees braided together, their separate trunks sharing the same root system while reaching toward the water in different directions. They seemed to embody the exhibition’s central paradox: how individual experiences—Smith’s year, O’Keeffe’s decades in New Mexico, my single afternoon—can spring from the same source of artistic attention, each reaching toward its own light while remaining fundamentally connected.
The trees measured time differently than I did, differently than Smith’s camera, differently than the museum’s visiting hours. Yet somehow, in that afternoon’s encounter, all these temporal rhythms found a way to speak to each other.
These encounters with art that transcends time remind me why I write about the spaces between feeling. We know that grief and joy often find ways to occupy the same moment, the same breath. We know time is an illusion when it comes to most things that matter: how far we’ve come, how long healing takes, how long it takes to find our way toward the light.
Even if time is illusion can we agree that creativity helps us navigate the complex terrain of being human?
Scroll down to click the link and listen to “Gone Again” by Pattie Smith.
Thank you for reading.
As always, I hope you find Between Grief and Joy a space where you find mirrors for your experience, windows to understand others and confirmation that your emotions are valid, your healing is supported and you are never alone.
-Yolande
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