"It's About Time" at Green Road Park Community Center
R. Stein Wexler
Photograph by Derrick Beasley
Artist R. Stein Wexler has installed two temporary artworks that use common idioms to invite visitors to Raleigh parks and community centers to question dominant notions of time. The artworks can be found over the main entrances at Lions Park Community Center and Green Road Park Community Center.
To create the artwork, named "It's About Time", Stein researched conceptions of time focused on global majority and non-western thought as well as the physics of time. These philosophies, while somewhat in line with each other, are at odds with how we measure and commodify time in our society.
The marquee text installations at both community centers take common idioms about time out of the context of speech and into the context of recreation and leisure. They invite the visitor to consider ways in which they “make time” or “take your time.” They also contextualize spaces of publicly sponsored leisure as spaces to escape the commodification of time. The exhibit text for this piece explores this tension and poses questions to the viewer, which can be answered via a QR code.
Learn more about "It's About Time"
About the Artist
R. Stein Wexler
Stein (she/her) is a practicing public artist trained as an urban planner. Stein’s projects are research-based, community-engaged, and critical of dominant structures. Shaped by needs and constraints, her work results in gatherings, process documentation, immersive and interactive installations, workshops, and exhibitions. A key characteristic of her work is offering numerous points of entry to a project: be it through sensory experiences, information-sharing, participation in the creation process, or community- and connection-building. The journey to the end of her work is just as important as the final product which often results in social as well physical infrastructures.
Stein’s current work includes a series of installations investigating alternative temporalities in Raleigh, NC, a series of neighborhood safety interventions in Durham, NC, and an ongoing multi-phase remembrance process in Berlin, Germany. Other projects have included a multi-media installation in Chisinau, Moldova appropriating the visual language of signage prevalent on the facades of the city; a counter-memorial piece in Krakow, Poland examining the touristification of trauma, and a collaboration with residents of an elderly lesbian housing development in Berlin. Her public art has been supported by Raleigh Arts, the Berlin Senate for Culture and Social Cohesion, CEC ArtsLink, as well as the Duke-Durham Partnership and the Mellon and Z. Smith Reynolds Foundations, among others. Stein was an artist in residence at documenta fifteen in Kassel, Germany and a German Chancellor’s Fellow at Berlin’s Center for Art and Urbanistics (ZK/U).
Stein holds a Master’s in City and Regional Planning from the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill where she received the Parker Fellowship and served as the co-editor in chief of the Carolina Planning Journal. Stein holds a BA with honors in English from University of California, Berkeley. She divides her time between Berlin, Germany and Durham, NC.
R Stein Wexler's Website | R Stein Wexler's Instagram
About SEEK Raleigh
SEEK Raleigh is an experimental public art program by Raleigh Arts that engages the community through public art in City of Raleigh Parks, greenways, and/or community spaces. The program provides an opportunity for artists to introduce the public to new, unusual, and thought-provoking experiences through temporary public art.
Learn more and apply to the SEEK Raleigh artist call
About Raleigh Arts
Raleigh Arts, a part of the City of Raleigh’s Parks, Recreation and Cultural Resources Department, fosters and promotes the arts in Raleigh by administering the programs of the Raleigh Arts Commission and the Public Art and Design Board and supporting the Pullen and Sertoma Arts Centers.
