Persistence of Time
Lina Viste Grønli

September 10 — 17, 2022

Opening Park Reception:
Saturday, September 10, 2022
5:30PM - 9:00PM

415 S St Louis St, Los Angeles, CA 90033
Hollenbeck Skate Park, Boyle Heights

Lina Viste Grønli’s sculptures remind us that our perceptions, concepts and memories are impermanent and mutable, especially those associated with objects and words. Her practice considers that mental phenomena is subject to change, while material phenomena has agency. Grønli’s object collages are a kind of slight of hand that challenge the limits of sculpture and penetrate linear, categorical based perception. At times her work echoes to animism: objects possessing a life force, but also symbols, word pairings, true names, and metaphors, with which these things can dance and form relationships with. There is a kinship to the innate animist world view of children where innert objects are anthropomorphized, yet there are subtle narratives and questions which still crawl within her pieces.

For her exhibition Persistence of Time hosted by Court Space at a skate park located within Hollenbeck Park, one of Boyle Height’s historic parks and a bird sanctuary in Los Angeles, Lina Viste Gronli playfully manifests a web of illogical allegories through sculptures resembling watches and clocks. Chewed pieces of gum walk along the surface of wrist watches at a tempo, Camembert cheese melts upon clock faces, park trees transform into clock towers — all to some time force of the park and those in it. What emerges is a skate park interpreted as a landscape, not unlike the unconscious and absurd semiotics of Dali’s The Persistence of Memory, yet one occurring in real time.

Yet Lina Viste Grønli’s sculptures in this LA environment pierce deeper into allegorical metaphysics, like the subtleties of a Zen koan. A koan is a linguistic play used to instigate a nagging question that penetrates one’s awareness about nonduality of subject and object. For example:

If you meet the Buddha, kill the buddha — Linji Yixuan, 临济义玄

Koans are apart of Buddhist pedagogy, falling in the realm of upaya उपाय, expedient means) where conscious, voluntary action “is driven by an incomplete reasoning” about its direction. Teachers and monks use upaya to transmute the dharma through illustrating the paradox of knowledge, and the fickle—and often contextual—nature of memory. Yet, understanding is often subjective to each pupil’s individual experience and karma.

Is Lina Viste Grønli a maker of koans? Is it possible the koan Lina poses through Persistence of Time is an allegory to contemplate and experience impermanence? That every second is our birth, is our death, is after our birth, is after our death, is yesterday, is the day that passed — an eternal impermanence tracked on a wrist watch with no clock mechanism.

Viste Gronli’s week long Court Space exhibition is made possible through the generosity of Hollenbeck Park, the community of Boyle Heights, and The Los Angeles Department of Parks and Recreation.