William T. Carson: Time Out of Time
Nüart Gallery announces Time Out of Time, a new solo exhibition by William T. Carson, bringing deep geologic time into dialogue with the present moment.

The body of work grew out of Carson’s fascination with time: the collision between human time and deep time, measured time and immeasurable time, abstract time and felt time, and time in all of its many layered and varied forms.

Coal has been Carson’s primary medium for over a decade. He is drawn to the material for the way it reflects the brevity of a single life set against geologic timescales—a memento mori material. To hold a piece of coal is to hold ancient sunlight: plants that absorbed sunlight in Montana sixty million years ago, later buried, compressed, and transformed into a flammable black rock. Coal, in this sense, is time made material.

In the series Second Nature and O’Clock, compositions inspired by clock faces emerge from fragments of mica catching light against the deep shadow of coal. The pairing of deep time with daily clock-time calls attention to a paradox: an hour set against sixty million years feels like a grain of sand in an endless desert, yet millions of years accumulate through the slow passage of time, one moment at a time.

The exhibition’s centerpiece is a clepsydra, an ancient water-clock form whose name comes from the Greek for “water thief.” In Carson’s installation, water drips onto boulders of coal, marking the passage of time while activating the coal to produce a faint crackling sound—the sound of the present moment falling onto millions of years of accumulated time.

The exhibition’s title carries three meanings for Carson. The first is the expansive sense of time that emerges when chronological time falls away and a place, moment, or object exists in an open present. The second is the paradox of time itself, understood at once as a predictable, steady mechanical march and as something that stretches and bends: the way memories persist in the present, a single day can feel expansive while months pass in a blur, and time seems to accelerate as we grow older. The third is literal: the works in the exhibition are both about time and made of time, built from materials that are themselves the product of millions of years of geologic process.

Carson traces his interest in these subjects in part to his years as Program Manager at the Holt/Smithson Foundation, from 2019 to 2025, where he worked closely with the creative legacies of Nancy Holt (1938–2014) and Robert Smithson (1938–1973), two artists whose engagement with time, geology, and the cosmos shaped his desire to explore these questions in his own work.

Carson credits growing up on a cattle ranch in rural Montana, surrounded by coal mines, for his interest in working with the material to create paintings, sculptures, sound performances, and time-based installations.

Time Out of Time brings different scales and experiences of time into proximity: geological and astronomical time, mechanical and calendrical time, the fleeting present and the duration of a human life. The exhibition, Carson notes, is ultimately an acknowledgment that deep time may never be fully grasped intellectually, but perhaps we might encounter its traces through beauty.