The Studio Museum in Harlem

Titus Kaphar

Midnight is the instant when yesterday and tomorrow meet. It is the witching hour, the time of reckoning and-in everything from fairy tales to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists-a moment fraught with equal parts magic and angst. Time’s unalterable trajectory leaves in its wake past regrets, future anxieties and a formless present known as the contemporary. Midnight is a version of contemporaneity-neither past nor future, but the fleeting “now” that sutures the two together.

If midnight had a dream life, perhaps it could imagine mash-ups of its own. A collage of singular events might meet in one location, much like Wardell Milan’s assorted cut-out figures, which congregate in fantasy tableaux. The witching hour could bring diverse historical moments together in conversation, mirroring Titus Kaphar’s diptychs, installations that capture a midnight moment when museum paintings magically come to life. Or midnight may dream of the perpetual night in Demetrius Oliver’s photographs, when the planets and stars are always visible and revisiting the past is an essential tool for constructing the future.

Each of this year’s Artists-in-Residence offers a vision of the contemporary in which time is malleable and, upon viewing time’s manipulations, viewers also gain a critical distance from contemporary visual culture.

The Artists-in-Residence Program is made possible by generous support from: Nimoy Foundation, Elaine Dannheisser Foundation, The Greenwall Foundation, the New York State Council on the Arts, a state agency, Helena Rubinstein Foundation, Jerome Foundation, Dedalus Foundation, Milton & Sally Avery Arts Foundation and an endowment funded by the Jacob and Gwendolyn Lawrence Trust and the Andrea Frank Foundation.