Meg Griffiths
For a Brief Moment, 2021
8½ x 11" Archival pigment print
6½ x 7¾" Image sizeEdition of 22
Each print includes a certificate of authenticity, numbered and hand-signed by the artist.
About the Image
We are finite in the infinite. I am an event on the planet. You are an event too. As much as a rock, a flower or a tear in a cushion. We all swim and swirl in a sea of events. The inception of each and the duration of all are unique unto themselves. I think what I was trying to convey in this one image is this difference in time, how it is perceived and how it just is. How they all overlap and coexist for a brief moment.
My father, a geologist, would talk about this layering of time in the sediment as a child when we would travel around the country on camping trips. How we could see all around us a history of the earth and how it was formed. That when you look you can see it speaks a story of deeper time. And the events that happened just the right way to make the rock I would pick up and hold in my hand as a six-year-old and say “what is this one?” His response inevitably, “it’s not just one thing, it’s made up of many.” And then would tell the story of the rock.
The body is of course different, but in a way speaks to something similar. The chance event of inception, the specific factors it takes to form that human frame, that person who is encased inside. It too is a mark of time, and pressure and circumstance, a culmination of many things. And then I think about the time that it takes for that same body to wear a tear into a cushion. The cushion and the tear remaining long after the body is gone. The plucked flower a child gives a mother, or a lover gives to their other. Seemingly the most ephemeral of the expressions of time is the flower, the sentiment lasting ever longer. And the exquisiteness and indifference of it all.
Artist Bio
Meg Griffiths was born in Indiana and raised in Texas. She received Bachelor of Arts degrees from the University of Texas in Cultural Anthropology and English Literature and earned her Master of Fine Arts in Photography from Savannah College of Art and Design. Her work has traveled nationally and internationally and can be found in various collections such as Center for Creative Photography, Capitol One Collection, and the Museum of Fine Arts Houston. Her book projects, both monographs as well as collaborative, have been acquired by various institutions around the country such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Duke University Libraries, Museum of Modern Art, University of Virginia, University of Iowa, Clemson, Maryland Institute College of Art, Ringling College of Art, and Washington and Lee University, to name a few. She currently lives in Denton, Texas where she is the Assistant Professor of Photography in the Division of Visual Arts at Texas Woman's University.