Sarah Shepard Gallery is pleased to announce Time and Place, a two-person exhibition featuring recent works by Bay Area artists Blake Aaseby and Dwight Eschliman. Aaseby and Eschliman both explore mark-making, geographical documentation, and the passage of time in their respective mediums of drawing and photography. Eschliman’s One Day series celebrates geospecific documentation of time and its transitions, while Aaseby’s work aims to ground itself in a more liminal, mental landscape.
Aaseby textile-inspired drawings—made with pastel on Crescent Select Mount Board on wood panel—rely on rhythm, pattern, and methodical mark-making to “map the intricate stages and types of memory.” His work navigates the fluid relationship between place and memory, using a combination of drawing, painting, and storytelling to create works that invite viewers on a journey through both physical and mental landscapes. Individual and collective narratives are present in each piece. The Tourist, the largest pastel drawing Aaseby has made to date, blends images from Marin’s marshlands with pixelated references to nostalgic movie scenes. As a space that is both foreign and familiar, personal and collective, The Tourist speaks to the way collective memories and traditions—such as movies, television, sports, and memorabilia—settle into our experiences and help create a sense of belonging and home. Aaseby’s patchwork landscapes, A Proximate Patchwork (Desolation) and A Proximate Patchwork (Restoration), also restructure familiar spaces by creating a composite of perspectives that never quite allows for total comprehension: with distance comes overall clarity and newfound confusion. Like A Proximate Patchwork (Desolation) and A Proximate Patchwork (Restoration), much of Aaseby’s work has a textile quality to it, particularly in its allegiance to a grid-informed, patchwork structure. Pieces such as Pedigree and Lineage work specifically
within the history and trajectory of the houndstooth pattern, sharing an abstracted, reconstructed view of the iconic pattern while also participating in its collective use.
Time and Place also features six works from Eschliman’s One Day project, an exercise in cataloging a specific unit of time, whether it be one day or one hour. One Day’s depiction of all 86,400 seconds of a 24-hour period both abstracts the day and reinterprets it. Always turning to the sky, Eschliman documents shifting light and color. Clouds, sunrises, sunsets, and the occasional bird or airplane are captured in square images that are subsequently organized chronologically. The assembled photographic pieces reimagine a space that is both geographically static and visually variable, offering a distinctive portrait of time and place. One Day captures a singular moment of time while also putting it into motion, frame-by-frame. While some of Eschliman’s subjects are local to the Bay Area—Mill Valley or San Francisco—those included in Time and Place are primarily from farther edges of the world: New Zealand, Norway and Brazil. Each pixel of sky, stamped side by side, also inherently records Eschliman’s travels to these locations.
In Time and Place, Aaseby and Eschliman document the passage of time in two different formats: drawing and photography. For both artists, pixilation and patchwork are essential strategies for their composite imagery, which create larger decorative and functional studies of the intersection of time and place. Their methodical yet nostalgic work invites viewers to recall their own memories of place and their own methods of keeping time.
Artist Bios:
Blake Aaseby is a San Francisco Bay Area artist, exploring themes of memory, loss, and the understanding of place. Inspired by a nomadic suburban childhood he describes as, “a floating root system,” his work wrestles with the transient nature of belonging through the use of impasto oil, handmade carving tools, and layered mark-making. He holds an MFA in Studio, Drawing and Painting from the School of the Art Institute of Chica- go and a BFA in Drawing and Painting from Azusa Pacific University. Aaseby is the recipient of numerous awards and grants, including the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant and a Uprise Art x MacArthur Place Artist Resi- dency in 2025. His work has been exhibited across the United States, most notably at the de Young Museum.
Dwight Eschliman is a San Francisco Bay Area commercial photographer and animator, bringing his precise, clean, and conceptual aesthetic to commercial campaigns for a plethora of well-known brands and companies including Rothy’s, Sephora, eBay, Adidas, Apple, Walmart, Snickers, Nickelodeon, Comedy Central, Absolut, and Audi, among others. His work has been featured in the New York Times Magazine, Wired, and Time. Re- cently, he’s turned his attention to documenting time and place for his award winning One Day Project. Eschli- man lives with his wife and two sons in Mill Valley, California.
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