How much time can a rock contain? For over two decades, Maya Kramer has explored the relationship between humans and nature, transforming familiar materials, phenomena and landscapes into something suddenly enigmatic. Her practice begins with observing the real world, only to question the ways in which we perceive and alter it. For In the Time It Takes, the artist’s second solo exhibition at Capsule, the starting point is an expedition she made to Svalbard in 2023. Fossils, geological strata and ancient glaciers become tools for confronting the immensity of the Earth’s timescale with the speed of environmental change in the present. Paintings, sculptures and installations reconstruct nature without simply imitating it. Tree bark becomes a possible fossil of the future; cyanotype images of fossils envelop an entire room; artificial rocks made of plaster and clay open like books, revealing fragments of natural and human history. In the paintings, landscapes evoking Romanticism are engraved with maps and data charting the terrain and wind patterns. Memory and measurement, wonder and apprehension ultimately coexist on the same surface, reminding us that human history occupies only a few pages in the Earth’s much longer story.
