06/08/2026
Tonight at ATA, Abigail Severance and Lori Goldston present A Time and Space Machine.
Shot entirely in public spaces, Abigail Severance's recent work plumbs the politics and promises of witnessing through a lens, tenderly wrestling with our apocalyptic anxieties. From trains and elevators to tourist traps and quiet nightscapes, she explores how entropy and surrender might stir radical imagination. In imagining what comes after the anthropocene, what could it mean to consciously surrender human authorship of the global landscape? What promise do the wild, rewilding, and wilderness hold for uncertain futures?
With live accompaniment by cellist Lori Goldston, the program begins with Public Square (2026), a collection of moving images that propose a "documentary choreography" to feel how time passes as people occupy, resist or claim public space. The second part of the program includes two of Severance's recent train films (You Recall the Night Train & You Are A Time Machine, both 2025). In an experiment toward possible world-makings and un-makings, we find a train is both soothing and sinister, both body and apparatus, a rocking, syncopated animal, a time and space machine.
Program: Shot entirely in public spaces, Abigail Severance’s recent work plumbs the politics and promises of witnessing through a lens, tenderly wrestling with our apocalyptic anxieties. From trai…
