Rachel Shelton, “Slow Looking”, May 22–August 1, 2026

On Letting Go
Curatorial Essay by Edward Y.J. Millar and Rachel Shelton

“All the forms of stone, each of which represents some state of its evolution, exist simultaneously in the world: the ancients are all in daily contact with their grandchildren.”
Francis Ponge, Le Parti pris des choses

Entropy is an inevitable and timeless process. Over time, systems naturally move from order to chaos. Nature tends toward maximum disorder and decay. Though we often meet this reality with resistance, reluctant to accept change or precarity, curiosity can transform these inevitable endings into opportunities. As things break down (a tree, a mountain, a creature), they become foundations for new life and new ecosystems. Rather than fearing, fighting against, or trying to control these natural processes, can we instead find beauty and relief in them?

Slow Looking is a new body of work by Rachel Shelton that challenges the negativity so often associated with decay, uncertainty, and precarity. When things shed the weight of their past lives, there is also hope, potential, and relief. New connections and contexts, once thought impossible, become real. With installation work and a series of repeated and reiterated prints of rock forms, Shelton reminds us that it is the nature of things not only to fall apart, but to begin again.

Shelton draws inspiration for her work from the natural world, with rock forms providing one of the best examples of the dualities of growth and decay; of entropy and stability. Despite their inevitable change in form—from mountain to boulder to rock to pebble to sand—we feel a constant sense of awe and wonder at whatever state we find them in. We accept their ephemerality. Just as we look with admiration upon the grandeur of a mountain, so too do we treasure the smallness of a pebble held in the palm of our hand.

All of the rock forms in Slow Looking originate from a single photo of two rocks in a field of glacial deposits that Shelton stumbled upon during a trip to Montana. With adjustments to scale, orientation, color, and surrounding compositions, the prints invite us to shift between micro and macro perspectives and consider the ecosystems pocketed within a life cycle. Her work documents the passage of time via the life cycle of a rock, suggests the building blocks of larger structures, and navigates the network of meaning and connections that forms when things fall apart.

The rectangular etching and carborundum plates in the prints represent time, progress, building, space, and ambiguous scale shifts. They function as a narrative element, a language whose story unfolds print to print, arcing across time to speak on ever-changing compositions and relationships. The screenprinted rocks present the throughline of one object changed over time—forever falling and floating towards a new state of being.

When we accept entropy and precarity, we feel a weightlessness. We feel a sense of clarity as we accept the context of a new reality. Shelton’s work creates space to rest in this clarity: to pause and acknowledge the inevitability of disorder, erosion, and decline, to view them in a freshly positive, inquisitive light. Slow Looking reminds us that by associating impermanence with gloom, we shield ourselves from other, brighter truths. Decay is literally a shedding of weight, an easing of burdens. Entropy and disorder—the uncertainty of future states—hold hope as much as fear. And in their nature is the promise of potential: each phase of unravelling will always build something new.

Press Release available here.