Valeska Soares: Ouroboros

Alder & Co., 222 Main Street, Germantown NY 12526

Hours: Friday – Sunday 11:00 AM – 6:00 PM

Valeska Soares creates poetic works that fuse and expand upon the languages of post-minimalism and conceptual art. The installation Ouroboros (2014) maps the relationships between time and space. The work’s title refers to the symbolic representation of a serpent swallowing its own tail—a metaphor for wholeness and infinity. Soares replaces this mythological act of consumption with a golden pocket watch (in Portuguese, the word for gold is ouro) that is suspended from the ceiling by a delicate chain. The watch executes an almost imperceptible rotation in space, turning at the speed of one revolution per hour. Deprived of its hour hand, which Soares removed, the clock loses its function of offering a reference to a specific moment in the day. Instead, it attests to the inexorable passing of continuous time.