Fern Nesson
All Here, All Now
Here, now is all we have. We bring all of our past to the present moment and within us is all of the potential for the future.
Our subjective experience of time is continuous and uniform, emerging from the past and flowing toward the future. But Einstein proved that time varies relative to the speed of light, slowing down or speeding up depending upon our own trajectory through space. And Buddhists say time is cyclical, always repeating. Some physicists even assert that, given the right conditions, time may flow backwards.
As a scientist, I line up with Einstein; spiritually, I feel kinship with Buddhism. Like all of us, I experience the forward flow of time’s arrow, rushing me all too fast into my future. But, as a photographer, I don’t have to choose sides. For me, the debate is both infinitely interesting and totally beside the point. Whatever we believe the nature of time to be, we have only the present moment in which to experience it. Living in that moment and capturing its essence in an image is reward enough.
These images and video are my way of communicating that we have only the present moment. We cannot relive the past and the future will never come. When and if we get there, it will be the present. All here, all now.
Artist Bio
Fern L. Nesson is a fine art photographer and installation artist who lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She received an MFA in Photography from Maine Media College, where she is currently the school’s first post-graduate Fellow. Her spare, abstract photographs are not constructed. Instead, they distill reality to its essence, embodying the moment when mass becomes energy.
Nesson’s videos have been exhibited at the MIT Museum Studio in September-November, 2019 (“La Vérité est la Créatrice d’Illusions”) and at the Meta-Lab Gallery at Harvard in October,2019. (“E=mc2″). She has had three solo exhibitions of her photographs: “E-mc²” at Les Rencontres de la Photographie and Voies Off Festival in Arles, France in 2019, “Be Living” at the Pascal Gallery in Rockport, ME. in 2018 and “The Light Dances” at Panopticon Imaging in Rockland, MA. in 2016. Currently, her work is showing at the Praxis Gallery In Minneapolis, MN.
Her photobook, Signet of Eternity, was recently chosen for the 10th Annual Self-published Photobooks show at the Davis-Orton Gallery (2019) and is currently showing at the Griffin Museum (2020).
“Abstraction and Perception,” an exhibition of Nesson’s photographs will open at the Beacon Gallery in Boston on March, 2020.
Contact Fern Nesson