ALEXANDRIA, VA.- Torpedo Factory Art Center’s newest installation, The Cycle of Nature and Time, invites viewers to reconnect with nature this winter season.

Each year, the Torpedo Factory Art Center commissions artists to create an installation to be on view during the winter season to activate the Art Center through the busy holiday season. This year, artist Saya Behnam, Torpedo Factory Art Center studio 229, presents The Cycle of Nature and Time, an installation that features a cascade of dried flowers and plants to represent the cycles of nature. Benham’s work invites viewers to contemplate the winter season as a time for regeneration and decay, important to the natural cycle of life.

In her artist statement, Behnam says, “I try to show the beauty of life in death, the rhythm, harmony, and the cycle of nature and time in fresh, dried and decayed. The lack of attention to our environment and surroundings made me focus the viewers’ attention back on this cycle while celebrating its beauty.”

Viewers will find the installation is rife with symbolic imagery, with every object acting as a metaphor for the cyclical nature of time. The predominant dried flowers and plants represent life and death. Viewers can spot mechanical clock fixtures, such as pendulums and clock hands, weaved throughout the installation to represent the passage of time in a day and the connection with humanity.

Below the main ceiling installation sits a golden sphere which Behnam describes as representing the sun, the earth, and the larger universe we occupy. Surrounding this golden sphere are rocks painted with the signs of the Zodiac to represent the cycle of the earth around the sun. Finally, there are scattered ashes, soil, and clays to symbolize decay and becoming one with the earth once more.

Behnam used hundreds of plants for this installation, most of which were found and collected in Alexandria and throughout Northern Virginia.

Listen closely and visitors will hear ambient nature sounds, reinforcing the connection between the viewer and nature and encourage them to sit with the work, in a moment of immersion, contemplation, and tranquility.

The Cycle of Nature and Time is on view in Studio 9 on the first floor of the Torpedo Factory Art Center through February 12, 2023.There will be an artist reception with Saya Benham on Friday, December 9 at starting at 6pm, with an artist talk at 6:30pm.

Saya Behnam is an Iranian American artist with more than 20 years of experience in painting, sculpture, and installation art. Her art practice is inspired by nature, the juxtaposition of time and space, birth and death, and sacred or fractal geometry patterns observed in natural forms for the structures of growth, energy, decay, chaos, and order. By creating her handmade colors and inks from minerals, fresh or dried flowers, spices, plants, earth stones, and other pigments —the medium intelligence, an essential aspect of her creative process—they aren’t just mediums; those are parts of places and time. She currently works out of studio 229 in the Torpedo Factory Art Center.