Hammer Museum's newest exhibition titled Several Eternities in a Day: Form in the Age of Living Materials unfolds as a meditation on matter that breathes, shifts, and remembers. Bringing together twenty-two indigenous and brown artists from across the Americas, the exhibition centers on substances like avocado, cacao, achiote, cochineal, clay, and stone; all materials that resist stillness. They seep, erode, and transform, holding both ancestral memory and future possibility. Artists including Jackie Amézquita, Carmen Argote, Guadalupe Maravilla, Edgar Calel, Esteban Cabeza de Baca, and more have created works that hover between the tangible and the fleeting. The title of the exhibition, drawn from Nicanor Parra’s poem “Cronos,” reflects time as both immediate and immeasurable. As an idea echoed in forms that are never fixed, only evolving.

The exhibition reveals itseld in three fluid “acts,” emphasizing the performative life of these materials. In the first act, “Breathing, Bleeding, Crumbling Form,” large-scale installations pulse with physicality. Calel arranges ceremonial boulders rooted in Maya-Kaqchikel traditions, while Amézquita builds towering earthen walls of volcanic soil, turmeric, and cacao. Argote’s delicate avocado paintings feel fleeting, and Maravilla’s intricate sound sculptures, named Disease Throwers, resonate as instruments of healing for spiritual and physical hurt.

The second act, titled “Cosmic Abstraction and Communal Form,” moves into a more cosmic register, where abstraction becomes a shared language. Esteban Cabeza de Baca and Gustavo Caboco create landscapes that seem to dissolve, while Santiago Yahuarcani paints mythologies onto tree bark. A film created by Sky Hopinka stretches across the gallery like a moving painting, bending land and water into something dreamlike. A painting that is literally in perpetual movement. 

The final act,  “Clay and the Manifestation of Form,” returns to clay as an elemental material, to emphasize a connection to Earth and the ground we tread upon; the Earth being the most ever changing, ever evolving example to bind this show together. Rose B. Simpson presents clay figures that feel both ancient and otherworldly, alongside works by Raven Halfmoon, Ayla Tavares, and Gabriel Chaile. A soundscape by Raven Chacon threads through the exhibition, culminating in an immersive finale. 

Historical artistic figures deepen the dialogue within this exhibition. Pieces by Carlos Mérida, Ana Mendieta, Mary Sully, and Francisco Toledo anchor the show, reinforcing the exhibition’s central idea; materials are not inert, but alive with memory, carrying stories across time.