Curatorial project with Opalka Gallery (Albany, NY)
September 1–December 5, 2026
“Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes.”
In the United States Declaration of Independence, the phrase “light and transient causes” appears as a counsel toward restraint. It proposes a threshold—some grievances are too fleeting to justify rupture, some injustices are too minor to merit upheaval. In the centuries since the American Revolution, the power to determine that threshold remains unsettled.
Throughout American history, people have lived under conditions framed as temporary or insufficiently urgent to warrant redress. What is experienced as structural violence by some is rendered negligible by others—light enough to ignore, transient enough to postpone. This exhibition considers those asymmetries of perception.
Presented during America’s semiquincentennial, Light and Transient Causes gathers artists whose works attend to slow accruals or erosions that rarely announce themselves as singular events. Rather than a history punctuated by decisive moments—the dumping of tea, the signing of a document, the toppling of a statue—this exhibition suggests longer, quieter durations.
Featuring moving image, sculpture, painting, and photography, the works share a sensibility attuned to time as material and suggest events that do not climax, struggles that do not resolve cleanly. If revolution is imagined as explosive and instantaneous, these works insist on another register—one in which change, when it comes, is the result of sustained pressure rather than sudden revolt.
Meztli Castro Asmussen, Deborah Dancy, Sky Hopinka, Weihui Lu, Paul Miyamoto, Wendy Red Star, Liz Roberts, Alisa Sikelianos-Carter, Jean-Marc Superville Sovak, Millicent Young
Image: Sky Hopinka, When You're Lost in the Rain [still], 2018. HD video, stereo, color, 5m 5s