This is a long exposure from April 23 to May 21, 2025 at The Stamp Gallery | University of Maryland, College Park | Written by Rachel Schmid-James
Déjà vu is a phenomenon very few are unfamiliar with. The sensation that one has been somewhere or experienced something before often creates an uneasy feeling within its host. This disruption of thinking is abrupt and yet fleeting- leaving just as quickly as it came. In Julia Reising’s looping short film This is a Long Exposure, she combines prose and image to examine the overlap between movement, time, and the illusion of recall. Through the various frames of the video, Reising herself or objects such as a chair and lamp are seen interacting with a red linoleum box adorned with a tile-like pattern, a mobile corner. The piece then appears again in two inkjet photographs titled Linoleum Room Landscape One and Two, which are positioned as if in conversation with one another—each on opposing walls that converge to create a corner. Though the box is present, it is intangible—never appearing in its palpable form. Its absence highlights the idea of liminality: and poses the question of “how can we feel familiarity despite never being present with something?”
Since Albert Einstein first theorized that time was relative and nonlinear, but rather conceptualized through culture, not much has changed in our own human interpretations of how it functions. The human brain struggles to understand time in any way other than moving in a straight line. Our cycles influence this: all living things are born and die, an eternal circle. In This is a Long Exposure, Julia Reising plays with both time and space- challenging the way we perceive it. She questions whether anything can ever truly be still in our dimensional universe, and how medium, environment, and cyclicality can be reconciled.
The words that accompany the visual scenes of the video add a layer to the narrative Reising is building. It both starts and ends with Reising saying the phrase “And I am happy to have been here before,” intentionally inducing a sense of déjà vu within the viewer. She then comments on the foreign feeling the box activates, saying “unfamiliar. A door, a cornice moulding, a chair, a lamp.” She makes the viewer question their perception of domestic objects through their positioning in the corner, as well as our perception of where these objects fit into a space.
The diptych prints enhance this message. In one, the box is set against a green, leafy landscape, the shadow of the photographer and a branch visible and almost bleeding onto it. In the other, the box is the only object set against a stark, white wall- giving the opportunity for it to gain the viewer’s full attention. The simple backgrounds allow for reflection and for the feeling of intimacy with this inanimate object to continue to fester. By the end of the video and upon leaving the gallery, the viewer feels intrinsically tied to this intangible concept- a concept that encapsulates both the physical and the metaphorical. The ways we experience the metaphysical can be translated onto a smaller scale, as they have in this exhibition.
The reason humans are so rigid in our unwillingness to perceive time in a nonlinear way is that it disrupts our cultural creations of life and the universe. We find meaning in these systems and their strict nature, something so cemented that we don’t understand how to exist without them. Reising seeks to meld the familiar and unfamiliar into one, pushing the bounds of what is and what could be- that one can be somewhere and nowhere all at once, that we can truly accept the message “and I am happy to have been here before.”
Julia Reising’s work is included in This is a long exposure at The Stamp Gallery of the University of Maryland, College Park, from April 23 to May 21, 2025
For more information on Julia Reising, visit https://www.juliareising.com/.
