Installation of “Timekeeper” at After Hours Gallery, St. Paul, 2026



“Time Keeper” is the first solo exhibition by Christian Hastad since earning his MFA in Studio Art from the University of Texas at Austin in 2025. This body of work grapples with the anxiety of time, clarity, and how ephemeral moments are captured, rendered, and preserved within our increasingly accelerated digital environment. At the core of the exhibition is an interrogation of how memory slips away in an age of constant digital accumulation. Utilizing tight cropping to decontextualize casual iPhone snapshots, Hastad isolates fleeting fragments of daily life. By encasing these images and drawings in thick layers of dyed synthetic resin, he effectively fossilizes them, creating a modern-day equivalent of amber. The material simultaneously preserves the moment and renders it entirely inaccessible, locked beneath a slick, permanent barrier. While the smaller, intimately scaled panels act as quiet vitrines for these frozen moments, the exhibition’s larger pieces disrupt this stillness. Built to deharmonize, stretch, and warp structural textures, these works scramble visual data to mirror the instability of recollection. Conceptually and formally, “Timekeeper” draws heavy inspiration from the classic animated film Alice in Wonderland. Infused with motifs of flowers, rabbits, and clocks, the work plays with shifting, unpredictable scales, contracting and expanding to evoke the surreal, disorienting experience of watching time collapse in real time.