CalArts alum Gail Rebhan (Art MFA 81) turns the time-slicing quality of the photographic medium on its head in Gail Rebhan, About Time, a major showcase of works exploring the interconnectedness of change, social engagement, and time itself. The retrospective is on view from March 22 to Aug. 17 at the California Museum of Photography at the University of California, Riverside. The opening reception takes place on Saturday, March 22, featuring a gallery talk with Rebhan and Stein at 3:45 pm.
Four decades of photography unfurl in the exhibition, which is curated by the artist’s longtime friend and author Sally Stein. Accompanying the exhibition is Stein’s 2023 photobook, also titled Gail Rebhan, About Time (MACK, 2023). About Time travels to Riverside from the American University Museum in Washington, DC, where the show opened in 2023.
This iteration of the show includes a new body of artwork by Rebhan titled What Questions Do We Ask? (2024). The work, Rebhan’s reproduction of US census questions from 1790 to 2020, highlights the importance of how questions shift over time, thus creating a condensed social history of the nation.
Despite spanning decades, the exhibition pieces are thematically united by Rebhan’s interest in documenting the “gradual metamorphosis of everyday life”—whether affecting one’s own household or communities at large.
“I am very interested in change,” Rebhan was quoted in the official release. “Things are always changing. In some work, the intervals are brief, in others days or years. I often use dates to indicate the intervals. This shifts the way you look at the image.”
Also on display in the exhibition is Living, an installation featuring new studies of the artist’s body that challenge viewers to reckon with our societal obsession with youth. Another notable piece documents a grassroots community effort to salvage the historic Moses African Cemetery in Bethesda, Maryland.
“I hope people get a chance to connect this exhibition to their own lives,” said Rebhan. “A lot of the issues are very personal and specific to me, and I just think I am representative of what a lot of Americans go through in their stories. Even though it is extremely specific in each piece, there’s a universal quality to this exhibition.”
Rebhan is a Washington, DC-based photographer whose work humorously investigates time and change, often through the lens of the American middle class with which she identifies. She is a professor emerita of photography at Northern Virginia Community College. In January 2024, Rebhan was among the artists commissioned by the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities (CAH) for the juried exhibition, Legacy: Civil Rights at 60.
