Men in the Off hours - Central Server Works, Los Angeles, CA

The exhibition, inspired by poet Anne Carson’s Men in the Off Hours, will explore themes of fragmented time, identity, and the transformative, often overlooked moments that shape us and continues a series of exhibitions that find their point of origin in books and music in the gallery owner's personal collection.

Carson’s book opens by confronting the moments outside the bounds of traditional time. It is a meditation on figures—famous, forgotten, and mythic—who inhabit the silent, liminal spaces between action and reection. She invites us to reconsider the nature of masculinity, time, and presence by highlighting these "off hours"—times when history is not being made, but when profound personal and universal truths emerge.

The exhibition responds to this central idea by exploring how identity, masculinity, and time itself are shaped by these hidden, overlooked moments and artists in Men in the Off Hours engage with the quiet, often unnoticed moments where transformation takes root. Their work inhabits the liminal spaces between presence and absence, past and present, the constructed and the forgotten. Through material, image, and form, they explore how history is not only shaped by grand gestures but also by fleeting, introspective intervals—moments of waiting, decay, contemplation, and transition.

Like Carson’s fragmented approach to time, their practices embrace discontinuity, layering myth, memory, and the everyday into new constellations of meaning. Absence is not merely a void but a charged space, a residue of what once was or what could have been. Whether through abstraction, guration, or interventions in space, the works in this exhibition oer a meditation on the ways identity, masculinity, and personal history are shaped in these "off hours"—the unseen, the unrecorded, the deeply felt.

Just as Carson’s prose draws unexpected connections between gures like Thucydides, Virginia Woolf, and Lazarus, Men in the Off Hours brings together mythic and modern narratives, challenging the viewer to reconsider history and identity through what has been left out, erased, or obscured in the margins of time. The “off hours" are not moments of rest or inaction, but charged spaces of transformation—intervals where identity is negotiated, where absence carries weight, and where the passage of time becomes both material and subject and reflection. If you let them, they will coax out your own memory associations with these shapes, colors, and compositions, allowing those to accumulate, join the artists, intermingle.