Halsey Rodman's practice asks us to consider time in relation to everything from plants to planets, collapsing vast temporal scales into intimate, direct observation and simultaneous perspective.

Mastic Tree from Five Angles depicts the shadows of a slow-growing evergreen tree encountered at a residency in France. Working at night and using artificial light, Rodman rendered shadows cast from positioning the light in five different locations, condensing five different perspectives onto one sheet of paper in acrylic and graphite.

Rodman's description of the work's creation typifies his approach. "This drawing was made in August of 2023 in Cassis, a beach town not too far from Marseille. Pam (Lins) and I were at a residency there for four weeks and our patio had this beautiful mastic tree on one side, I ate breakfast under it every day. I was spending a lot of time listening to the sound of the cicadas at dusk and I was looking for a way to make a drawing from this listening, this openness to the environment, this flowing in from the outside. It’s not a linear process but this drawing emerged from that desire, to make a space to listen to the form of the mastic tree, to make a space to hold impressions of its form, so I drew the seven shapes and cast shadows from five angles to fill them. Later, I painted the space around the shapes night sky blue, so they would hang there in space, a constellation of shapes somewhere between positive and negative, held in configuration but just barely."