Hammer Museum exhibition turns earth, ritual, and time into a living field
At the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, “Several Eternities in a Day: Form in the Age of Living Materials” treats the gallery not as a neutral container, but as a breathing environment. Soil, sound, film, pigment, and decomposing fruit all work together to make the body feel implicated in the ground beneath it. On view through August 23, the exhibition gathers 18 contemporary artists, many of them Indigenous and Latinx, alongside four historic artists whose work still feels startlingly present.
The show opens with a sensory shift. Raven Chacon’s sound composition, Study for Vertical Earth (2026), sends low frequencies through the room, while Edgar Calel’s installation, Ch’ablin nu rayb’el Chua taj ab’ej (2026), lines the perimeter with loamy soil, banded boulders, oxidized blood, and eucalyptus stems. Translucent chartreuse washes on the walls suggest a mountain range in suspension, turning the gallery into something closer to a ritual landscape than a conventional exhibition space.
The title comes from Nicanor Parra’s poem “Chronos,” a reference that frames the exhibition’s interest in time as something uneven, lived, and elastic rather than strictly chronological. That idea is reinforced by the first work visitors encounter: Carlos Mérida’s Presencia del Ausente (1944), a vivid painting of pre-Columbian figures that establishes a lineage of material experimentation across the Americas.
Curated by Pablo José Ramírez, the exhibition is organized into thematic sections that move between bodily sensation and cosmological scale. In “Breathing, Bleeding, Crumbling Form,” Carmen Argote’s an archetype of stillness (2026) and an archetype of touch (2026) use cochineal, lemon juice, and mashed avocado on 15-foot sheets of paper. The fruit continues to decay, making change itself part of the work’s structure. As Ramírez put it during a walkthrough, “Anything that changes is alive.”
Ana Mendieta’s Grass Breathing (1974) and Burial Pyramid (1974) extend that logic into film, imagining the earth as a living, mutable body. Jackie Amézquita’s Cuerpos terrestres en fluidez (2025–26) carries the idea forward with rammed-earth fragments that echo falling rock, while Sky Hopinka’s Mnemonics of Shape and Reason (2021) opens the exhibition’s second act.
Not every work resolves into harmony, and that friction is part of the show’s force. Patricia Domínguez-Claro’s bright watercolors and Nereyda López Gutiérrez’s totemic figures introduce sharper visual breaks, reminding viewers that living form can be unstable, unruly, and resistant to easy synthesis. In the end, the exhibition’s achievement lies in how insistently it collapses distinctions between body and landscape, past and present, matter and memory.
