“Then I reflected that all things happen, happen to one, precisely now. Century follows century, and things happen only in the present. There are countless men in the air, on land and at sea, and all that really happens happens to me.”—Jorge Luis Borges
To talk about Peggy Washburn’s photography, you have to talk about time. That makes me nervous—because I have this mushy gray clock in my head that doesn’t work very well. It ticktocks along to its memories, obsessing over its own peculiar past as if that past were reachable.
Relativity, the fourth dimension, the bigness of the universe and the smallness of its quantum fabric—all of these factor into the strangeness of time. Even so, what makes the past irretrievable is not its dissociative identity disorder but disorder of a less clinical kind. “Things fall apart; the center cannot hold.” I prefer Yeats here, but in physics, the shorthand is “entropy.”
In this series, fittingly titled “Entropy,” Washburn journeys into the wastelands of perception, memory, and relativity. Moments of disparate origins clash in seemingly ill-fitted diptychs. Or else the image struggles to develop, as shadows on all sides tighten their grip. Nevertheless, each picture holds together. And from that same chaos—maybe even because of it—the wondrous (beholden to nothing, not even entropy) makes itself anew.
As a child, for instance, Washburn was taught to use her right hand in class, though she preferred her left. Hence the images of left and right hands. But the circles we see derive from an inexplicable fascination that compelled her to draw them by the thousands. From that entanglement of obsession and restriction, a new symbolism emerges and makes for us a gift of the artist’s unique perception of time.
Hands and letters, circles and grids, chickens and children meet at the junction of what Washburn calls a “familiar disorder”—as good a phrase as I’ve ever encountered for this moment, this “now,” which is mine, not yours; yours, not mine; and already falling apart.