Assembled Overtime features the work of William Eric Brown, Jennifer Dalton, Rodney Durso, and Hanna Washburn, four artists whose studio practices vary widely but who all embrace durational modes of artmaking, whether through long-term research or unhurried material investigations. These literal and conceptual accumulations reveal themselves to varying degrees in the work on view, ranging from legibly collaged mixed media works to sculptural objects that collapse time in formally subtle ways. In an almost archival gesture, looking to the past while considering the future, all four artists share an interest in integrating existing materials, such as fabric, magazines, and photographs, into their process-driven practices, often repurposing them to create new, hybrid objects. While time is a throughline between these works, the West Chelsea Building, in which they are situated, bears its own timestamp. The fate of this storied home to artists’ studios and galleries remains unknown at the time of writing; will someone act before it is sold to a potentially inhospitable new owner? As the residue of past exhibitions and tenants mingles here with these works, each ascribed with layers of personal history and labor, Assembled Overtime offers ways to relate to the past, the present, and, ultimately, to each other.

Rodney Durso creates collages on board and canvas using materials culled from magazines, newspapers, and other sources of inspiration. With a background in graphic design, he integrates these complex fragments with bold shapes and lines painted in acrylic, building up layers over the course of many weeks in his studio. Occasionally these fragments express specific emotions or viewpoints, as in Robot Bird (2007), one of Durso’s “political rant” works on canvas, in which explosive forms overlap and fight for space, bursting forth from a source of pressure just out of view. Others act as formal experiments, as in his series of wood panel works that explore the possibilities departing from a simple, prefab starting point. Such is also the case for My Roman Quarantine (2023), a series of Polaroid photos documenting his solitary experience spent in Rome under a Covid-19-related quarantine in May 2022. Although Durso has not manipulated the photos, with their wide-ranging subject matter, together they act like a collage of days, documenting the objects and changing light that inspired him during this period of confinement. Representing nearly two decades of his output, Durso’s works on view here not only reflect his process-driven approach but also offer a way of reading a long-term artistic practice as a life-scaled collage, as forms, colors, and motifs emerge, recoil, and recur throughout the series.

The works in William Eric Brown’s ATKA works may also be described as collages but read less obviously as such. The series comprises photographs of Antarctica—printed in quarter-sheets and adhered together to form large images—to which Brown applies charcoal, graphite, or paint to embellish or obscure elements of the images, adding mysterious shadows or bursts of color to the bright, grayscale landscapes. The photos derive from slides of photographs taken by Brown’s father in the 1960s when he was on a Navy mission on the USS Atka. Brown fondly recalls the formative experience of seeing his father’s slideshows as a child in the 70s, and how the images became “embedded” in his mind. Today, he views himself and the photographs as “collaborators,” always taking care to balance his interventions and the originals. Speaking across time, the two mediums represent two generations’ different approaches to deft exploration. Brown has also commented on the inevitable reading of the ATKA series through the lens of the climate crisis, which he neither resists nor actively pursues. Time is thus a third collaborator here; the images’ relevance as iconography of the melting ice caps is simply another dimension of their latest contemporary reading.

Like Brown’s ATKA series, Jennifer Dalton’s works intermingle conceptual investigations with personal ephemera and experiences. Throughout her practice, Dalton examines sociocultural norms and oppressive societal structures, often deploying unsettling or tongue-in-cheek twists on familiar forms. Yet, Feel My City Breaking & Everybody Shaking (2021), a handmade accordion book, is among her more somber, diaristic works: It logs her experience of Covid-19 in New York. Created to reconcile how lockdown seemed to distort time, with the hindsight of 2025, the intimately scaled, intricate book now acts as a time capsule of collective oscillations between uncertainty, fear, and optimism throughout this period, during which it felt there was no end in sight. Pillar of Debt (2023) also materializes this notion of the oppression of time but from a standpoint of broader socio-economic critique. The work consists of paper pulp bricks made from torn-up credit card solicitations and offers Dalton received over a period of seven years. With its alluring gold façade, the work points to the exploitative tactics used by these companies—just as it took years for Dalton to accumulate the materials for Pillar of Debt, so too does it take years to unburden oneself from credit card debt; three in five Americans carry such debt. Taken together, Dalton’s works offer sharp perspectives on contemporary experiences that, while specific, underscore important issues pervasive in the US and beyond.

Hanna Washburn creates work using found and collected materials as well, but her resulting sculptures offer a hopeful complement to Dalton’s critical voice. Washburn hand-stitches her freestanding and hanging textile works to create forms that resemble bodily gestures or otherworldly creatures. Although not representational, each work freezes an exceedingly human moment of energized transformation, as with Embrace (2024), featuring negative space inside which one might imagine a person (or another sculpture) safely nestled. Washburn collects textiles from her own life and family and acquaintances and stitches the pieces together by hand using a technique she learned from her maternal forebears, embracing clashing patterns to suggest harmonious dialogues can emerge from unexpected places. These gestures heighten the embodied warmth emitted by her sculptures, even those that at first appear alien, such as the freestanding Weak in the Knees (2024). Thus, in these works, intergenerational knowledge and slow, analog labor converge to capture emotions and interactions that characterize our contemporary life and interactions, offering meditations on the value of person-to-person connection.

We are in desperate need of such empathy and connectivity, for this exhibition takes place in a time of unignorable crises: the sale of the West Chelsea Building, which exemplifies socio-economic issues of wealth disparity in New York and across the US; the climate emergency; and efforts by our government to seize power even if it hurts everyday people. Against this backdrop, political dimensions of these nuanced works emerge, whether through the instinct to conserve evoked by Brown’s images and Washburn’s recycled fabrics, or the reminder of how this president failed to serve the country in his first term, as documented in Dalton’s diary of life during Covid-19. In this context, these works offer ideas of how and what to hold onto while pushing into the future, together. The time to assemble is now.