Time and Material Feel Alive in Hammer’s ‘Several Eternities in a Day’

There is something primal, almost amniotic, about entering the dim space that makes up the first gallery of “Several Eternities in a Day: Form in the Age of Living Materials” at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. Here, the walls thrum with a muffled sound reminiscent of waves crashing or a creature breathing. The air is heavy with petrichor. In this cave-like space, the past feels briefly palpable in the present.

That soundscape is one of three compositions created for the exhibition by Raven Chacon. With speakers embedded into one wall, Study for Vertical Earth (2026) amplifies the otherwise sub-audible frequencies emanating beneath the earth’s surface. We register the raspy, low decibel recording as a vibration coursing through the room, through the body. Round the corner and the source of that perfumed scent comes courtesy mounds of loamy soil that line the perimeter and form a pathway from the mouth of the show into its depth. To this seemingly ancient installation titled Ch’ablin nu rayb’el Chua taj ab’ej (2026), Edgar Calel has added banded boulders that bear offerings: spills of oxidized blood and dried, ash-green eucalyptus stems. The walls are painted with translucent chartreuse washes of pigment that form an undulating mountain range.

The evidence of ritual locates Calel’s installation at a place and time where “bios” (life) and “geos” (earth) intersect, or perhaps more accurately shows they are one and the same. “Several Eternities in a Day” takes its name from a line in “Chronos” by Chilean poet Nicanor Parra, which, despite its title, describes how time in Chile isn’t always experienced as chronological. Rather it’s a place where “The days are interminably long / … / Yet the weeks are short.”

The exhibition, on view through August 23, features 18 artists, many of them Indigenous and Latinx, working today. They are complemented by four historic artists whose prints, ceramics, and films still feel Promethean today, collapsing time in the process. That approach is evident from the first painting visitors encounter in the exhibition, Carlos Mérida’s Presencia del Ausente (1944). This vibrant image of colorful pre-Columbian figures on a burnt umber background establishes a lineage of material experimentation across the Americas.

Elsewhere in the exhibition’s first act, titled “Breathing, Bleeding, Crumbling Form,” are two works, an archetype of stillness (2026) and an archetype of touch (2026), by Carmen Argote. For these 15-foot sheets of paper, treated with cochineal and lemon juice, Argote has run her fingers and feet into layers of mashed avocado to carve out two towering symmetrical figures. Now dried, the fruit’s flesh rises from the crimson plane in crusted scabs. Over the course of the show, the rotting fruit, a collaborator of sorts, will continue to decompose the paper beneath it, effectively transforming yet again into something new. “Anything that changes is alive,” said exhibition curator Pablo José Ramírez during a walkthrough.

Two films by Ana Mendieta, projected on a nearby wall, envision the earth as a living, changing entity. In Grass Breathing (1974), a lush patch of sod rises and falls as though inhaling, while in Burial Pyramid (1974), pale rocks tumble down a gentle slope, eventually revealing the artist’s body buried beneath. In Jackie Amézquita’s installation, Cuerpos terrestres en fluidez (2025–26), fragments of rammed-earth walls extend the image of falling rocks into the gallery; the work’s title, which translates to “Terrestrial bodies in flux,” further draws a connection between the human body and the earth.

Other works in “Breathing, Bleeding, Crumbling Form” disrupt this continuum to somewhat jarring effect. Patricia Domínguez-Claro’s suite of glo-brite watercolors of figures riding drones stand in stark contrast to Nereyda López Gutiérrez’s totemic characters composed from wood, bark, and woven vegetable fibers. What Domínguez Claro illustrates, López Gutiérrez animates. Described by López Gutiérrez as representations of spirits and the mothers of plants and animals, one untitled figure from 2025, posed on a platform in the center of the room, appears half human, half bird, with one painted wing fringed with feathers, a scaly claw, and a plumed crown atop its round, intricately carved head. Above, suspended from the ceiling, is an enormous creature with oversized eyes and a mask streaming braided tendrils.

The second act, “Cosmic Abstraction and Communal Form,” opens with Sky Hopinka’s mesmerizing assemblage film, Mnemonics of Shape and Reason (2021), which seems to set the surrounding paintings in motion: horizons are flipped, doubled, overlaid with saturated color. At times, the landscape flows like a river above a lambent sky, while in other moments, invisible guides lead you through verdant waterfalls and along winding desert canyon roads shot through with vertical bars of light or washed away by technicolor tides. With each rhythmic passage, buffeted by a swelling score of nature sounds and atmospheric instrumentals, the partition between the terrestrial and celestial, the known and unknown, thins. Scrambling non-Indigenous distinctions between landscape, memory, mysticism, and history, the film raises questions that reverberate throughout the presentation: how does knowledge pass through the land? What becomes possible when nature is approached not as something to dominate but as an indelible life force in its own right?

The earth as indelible life force comes to the fore in Santiago Yahuarcani’s epic paintings, which envision the experience of time as something layered and simultaneous. Composed on more than 14 feet of lanchama, a bark fiber native to the northern Amazon where the artist lives, Cosmovisión Huitoto (2022) amalgamates scenes from the past, present, and speculative future of the Huitoto people with natural and mythological characters and motifs. Rendered in Boschian detail, this tableau features people fishing, hunting, and tilling the land; elsewhere, massacres, fires, and sacrifices unfold. At the center is vision of a life-giving deity: a sprawling tree with an all-seeing eye on each leaf, a mouth, and extended arms reaching toward the people gathered beneath.

The final act, “Clay and the Manifestation of Form,” devoted entirely to works formed from earthen clay, fills an intimate, chapel-like gallery. A host of Rose B. Simpson’s signature busts and androgynous statuettes are arranged across two platforms as though on an altar beneath a three-paneled wall relief. In clay especially, evidence of ancestral knowledge endures both in material and in technique: Simpson uses the same land that her Pueblo ancestors have for centuries, updating traditions that have been transmitted from one generation to next. In this way, sculpting becomes a kind of oral history expressed through the hands rather than the voice. At the center of the room, two towering, heavily worked twin figures by Raven Halfmoon preserve the pressure and manipulation of the artist’s fingertips. The viscous surface, streaked with paint spills, makes Soku Sahyodahney’ah (2023) seem as though it is still wet to the touch—still capable of being reshaped.

Nearby, Ayla Tavares’s An always humid form (2024) extends this idea of materiality as a perpetual performance or expression. Within the totemic clay structure placed in the middle of an aquarium rests a clay sponge in the shape of a “bull’s head,” what ceramicists call the initial form from which a final work is molded. Suspended in a state of permanent dampness, its potential for transformation remains limitless. Here, the exhibition’s challenge to traditional binaries—between living and dead, human body and earth—is most persuasive. To imagine the natural world not as a passive resource but as an animate collaborator would be to reorder more than aesthetic categories, demanding another relation to our environment. Listening to Chacon’s oceanic soundscape in the final dark, sand-covered room, that proposition feels urgent, even essential. Whether this installation imagines a pre-human past or a post-human future might just depend on where you fall in this time continuum.