Plinth Gallery presents Geologic Time,
a solo exhibition of new sculpture by Aaron Sturtz. Bringing together a focused group of carved ceramic works, the exhibition extends Sturtz’s sustained inquiry into the formal, material, and temporal conditions of western landform.

Intimate in scale yet tectonic in sensibility, Sturtz’s sculptures twist, iterate, and erode without fixed orientation. Landscape is not treated as image or motif, but condensed into a sculptural syntax of cadence, interval, pressure, and void.

Grounded in years of climbing and canyoneering in the American West, Sturtz’s work proceeds from an embodied understanding of geologic form. The sculptures do not describe canyon space so much as internalize its spatial logic: compression and expansion, incision and accretion, exposure and shelter.

The exhibition’s title draws from mountaineer Gerry Roach’s phrase, “Geologic time includes now.” For Sturtz, the line names a central condition of landscape: landforms bear the marks of the forces that shaped them, and that shaping is ongoing. Geological time is not remote from the present; it is continuous with it. When we move through landforms, we are engulfed by their physical and temporal scale.

That proposition is carried into the work’s material logic. Clay is built, carved, and fired until it darkens, hardens, and cracks under heat, echoing the processes of the landscape itself. The title also indexes the structure of the work itself: interval, repetition, pause, variation. In this sense, geology is brought into relation with rhythm, movement, and measure.

At the core of Sturtz’s practice is a distinct formal grammar shaped by the shared syntax of geology, music, and calligraphy. Biomorphic curvature, calligraphic cadence, wildstyle graffiti, breakbeat syncopation, and the carved argillite pipes of Haida Gwaii are not cited directly, but absorbed into a vocabulary that is simultaneously devotional, improvisational, and formally disciplined.

GEOLOGIC TIME

Opening Reception:
Friday, October 2, 6-9 PM
Exhibition:
October 2-31

PLINTH GALLERY
3520 Brighton Blvd
Denver, CO 80216