after / time is thrilled to announce The Hours, the fruit of an ongoing conversation and engagement with emerging artist Sierra Faust. Originally hailing from Kansas City, this exhibition marks the first solo exhibition of Sierra Faust on the West Coast. With her approach to image, where image is not identified with opticality but remains open-ended to polyvalent forms and expression, Faust enacts not only a hermeneutic of historical poetry but offers alternative ways of conceiving and expressing time and labor. Based on her interest in text and language, both real and symbolic, written, spoken, or coded into the marks of a drawing.  Faust begins by designing a template and a set of rules for how she will perform an action – for example, a grid and the guidelines for how she will copy texts into it.  Copying removes the sense of authorship from language so the text can be viewed less as content and more as a material, a code, a thing.

This exhibition represents an extended exegesis of Hesiod’s Works and Days, a didactic poem in which the speaker addresses his younger brother, admonishing him to commit to a life of dedicated agricultural labor which will place him in good moral standing. Hesiod views this commitment to work as the path towards righteousness. Works and Days is both a moral guide and a meditation on labor, effort, and time. For Hesiod,  time is marked by seasons, and cycles of work, something that connected to the artist’s own exploration of repetitive processes as a form of meaning making.  The exhibition addresses this idea of repetitive commitment to labor through laborious drawing and mark making and asks what is revealed through work. 

In one of the opening passages of the poem, Hesiod describes two types of strife, one of which is characterized by war, destruction and conflict. The other is productive, hard work that leads to growth and positive ends. The work in this exhibition attempts to represent the latter.  This body of work mirrors the cyclical nature of labor Hesiod describes—work that reflects the grind of human effort and the meditative effect of losing oneself in a repetitive task. The work in this exhibition asks how mark making can function as a record of time and of the human hand at work. The work has been created within rigid parameters, echoing the poem's preoccupation with order and rules. The process is deliberately laborious and ritualistic, without a singular outcome or endpoint;  something that could continue in perpetuity like the agricultural labor Hesiod describes.

Photographed by Aaron Wessling