OPENING: SATURDAY, DECEMBER 5, 2026, 6-9 PM 

Exhibition Runs December 6 - January 17, 2027

 

Undivine Time by Tia-Simone Gardner revisits 2026, compressing 365 days of lived experience, memory, and reflection into a single timeline: the exhibition's run. The project invites us to examine what has been forgotten, what was actively or necessarily forgotten, and what we are bound to remember. By interrogating both the softness and hardness time reveals, the work seeks to reorient our understanding of temporality across multiple dimensions—weaving together human and more-than-human time, future and past horizons, and dark, uncataloged spaces. Central to this exploration is Undivine Time, a conceptual title directly inspired by Junauda Petrus's evocative writing.

 

“If it was up to them, 

the world would have no mamas,

just mother-wound. 

No dreams, just nightmares.

No poetry, just profit.

No passion, just power.

No water.

Just drink the ache

just exist small small 

Just wait until heaven

Just be grateful

This plantation is your paradise

Just be grateful

Everyday feels like a three card monte 

With the soul of the universe

Is it too much to ask to come to this planet 

and expect softness and stillness? 

To have a life centered around mundane? 

To move on divine timing and sensual clarity?

can’t sleep because you’re wondering, 

If they will snatch you in the street?”

-Excerpt “South Side, Soft Side” – Junauda Petrus (February 2026)

 

Photographs can hold time still, fixing a moment in permanent stasis. For this exhibition, the photograph is only the first chapter of the story. Gardner’s work is a vivid meditation on time: the velocity of landscapes and the way images can move as dynamically and dramatically as the spaces they capture. By bridging still imagery, moving pictures, and physical space, Undivine Time explores the fluid boundaries between human experience and the broader environment. Through this practice, Gardner interrogates how memory, history, and geography intersect, inviting the viewer to reflect on past, present, and future horizons within an ever-shifting landscape.

 

Gardner is a detective and a philosopher, whose visual language draws us into the earth and back out the other side, revealing connections that might otherwise go unnoticed. Whether she is working with the ground beneath our feet or the statue with a warning light in her hometown, she weaves together patterns that others might miss. Alongside a deep dive into her last 365 days of existence, she is also working on a project about Fairfield, her elders, and the geologic time that made her hometown a profitable racial landscape for U.S. Steel. In addition to this work, she continues to teach and build projects related to rivers, particularly the Mississippi River, and maritime history through a series of floating camera obscuras, all in service of a practice of social photography.

 

Tia-Simone Gardner is an artist, educator, and Black feminist learner. Her hybrid practice engages the Black geographic: long histories, some documented and some not, between Black folks and the fabricated environment. Gardner grew up in Fairfield, Alabama, and received her BA in Art and Art History from the University of Alabama in Birmingham. In 2009, she received her MFA in Interdisciplinary Practices and Time-Based Media from the University of Pennsylvania. She participated in the Whitney Independent Study Program as a Studio Fellow and has been an invited artist at a number of national and international artist residencies, including the Center for Photography at Woodstock, A Studio in the Woods, and IASPIS Sweden. She has received several fellowships, including a Smithsonian Artist Fellowship in 2020. In 2018, Gardner received a PhD in Feminist Studies from the University of Minnesota, where she completed a practice-based dissertation on Black folks, mobility, and the history of small (now tiny) house practices, titled 'Sensing Place: HouseScale, Black Geographies, and a Humanly Workable City.' She is a 2023–24 McKnight Visual Artist Fellow and a 2024 NYFA Anonymous Was a Woman Grantee.