Joshua Charadia: Seconds turn to minutes turn to seconds.: N.Smith Gallery

Seconds turn to minutes turn to seconds is a reflection on the transportive power of memory, a time capsule of fleeting fragments from Joshua Charadia’s transformative residency in Berlin. The artist presents an abstracted vision of the city and its inhabitants, the charged inertia of the human and accidental. As we encounter Charadia’s dizzying display of abstracted images, referencing photo memories of the artist’s experience abroad, our gaze searches for a sense of familiarity. 

Exploring these painted moments of stillness - the mind begins to drift. Landing on something familiar, a wash of colour, a gesture, a flash of light - you are plunged deep into the fullness of a moment long past, a memory that reveals itself from its hiding place in your subconscious. Time stops  as this memory triggers another, then another, and another, forming a dense interlocking web of threads around you. Reaching its centre, a flicker of clarity, it collapses and explodes in violent protest of its discovery. And then, stillness. The present resumes, as if awaiting your return, and the threads of memory slowly settle once again into the depths.

Woven throughout the refractions of streetlights and the overlapping forms of the urban landscape, figures emerge. At once spectral and corporeal, they melt into their environment. Charadia’s artworks reveal only hazy and incomplete figures, offering an open-ended provocation that contains infinite narratives that speak to our own. Like theatre acted upon a stage, the city casts characters from the bustle of a busy train platform and the shuffle of cobblestone streets or shines its streetlamp spotlight on solitary figures in quiet corners. 

Charadia’s work draws parallels with the quiet drama of Wim Wender’s iconic Berlin-based film Wings of Desire (1989). Listening to their unspoken thoughts, the protagonist, an angel (or ghost) closely observes the city’s population, not as a sinister presence, but as a yearning figure trying to connect and understand. Like Wender’s flaneur, Charadia observes the city in all its chaos and intimacy from the vantage point of the street. Visually disorientating, this series mimics the blurred architectural boundaries which overlap into the narratives of the people who inhabit them. From the view of the palimpsest streets he depicts a city in transit - construction sites, speeding trains, the bustle of pedestrians. 

Expanding on his signature motion blur technique, Charadia delves further into abstraction through his exhibition Seconds turn to minutes turn to seconds. Cinematically his subjects are captured by the unsteady slip of a hand-held camera, propelling innocuous, everyday moments into the realm of the sublime. The figures' anonymity, their stories we can only fabricate from brief encounters - involuntarily reach into our memories and become a part of our own. Relinquishing control, the city leaves us not without clarity, but with the infinite possibilities the individual represents.