We all experience the effects of time passing—waiting in lines, keeping schedules, and, most intimately, aging. Yet time itself is a fragile concept. Using instruments of measurement, time is quantifiable; but it is also immaterial and unfixed. Time is often perceived through emotion, imagination, and the distortions of memory.

Presented through the lens of the Broad collection, A Journey That Wasn’t considers complex representations of time in contemporary art. Nuancing our assumptions about linear time, artists employ a variety of devices such as rhythm, repetition, duration, artifice, and appropriation. Some allude to nostalgia or sentiments about aging by depicting specific places in states of decay; these works can act as documentation, memorial, or symbol. Still others imply movement or narrative within single images; in these works, historical styles and events are ruptured, collaged, and recontextualized, like portals into other worlds.

Central to A Journey That Wasn’t are artists that present perceptual changes of time. One such artist is Pierre Huyghe, whose artwork serves as the title of this exhibition. Huyghe’s work captures the artist’s trip to Antarctica in search of an elusive albino penguin and his later restaging of the expedition as a performance in New York’s Central Park. Huyghe’s journey, both real and simulated, provides a baseline for time in this exhibition. The artworks in A Journey That Wasn’t share a sense of careful contemplation through such deconstructions. These works destabilize variables often assumed as given or constant, offering new modes to assemble meaning.