So Late So Soon is a collaboration and dialogue between mother and daughter artists Randy Garber and Rachel Garber Cole. The work explores the concept of time: how it speeds up and lengthens, how the climate crisis catapults us simultaneously into the  future and into our geological past. As humanity sits at the edge of our own geological era (the Holocene), and as our planet warms rapidly to a world unrecognizable to 10,000 years of human consciousness, the artists ask: how do we weave the passage of time (and timescale) into the fabric of our daily lives? How do we attend to the micro when the macro is shifting around us in unexpected ways? 

Rachel Garber Cole’s photo series “Questions for a Dinosaur, Family Photos” explores these questions directly, posing herself as the Dinosaur mother in domestic scenes with her young son. Her husband, Jordan Levie, is behind the camera. In these images, time is collapsed as Deep Time, Future and Present exist together in the microscale of the home, where mothering attends to intimacy across minutes, hours, days. Her mother, Randy  Garber – now both mother and grandmother and the oldest living member of their family – responds to these images with her piece, “Marking Time.” Here time is felt rather than narrated. Her media, materials, mark making, methods and symbols evoke questions and  metaphors about duration, decay, revival, repetition, fragmentation, impermanence and  importance.

Artist Bios

Randy Garber has a studio practice that is divided between her studio in Somerville, MA and the Mixit Print Studio, also in Somerville where she is a Partner.

A recipient of many artist awards and grants including ones from the Traveling Fellowship from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, the Wynn Newhouse Foundation, the Puffin Foundation, the St. Botolph Foundation, The Somerville Arts Council. Her work can be found in museum, corporate and private collections including The Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the Decordova Museum, the Boston Athenaeum, The Boston Public Library, permanent commissions for the Children's Hospital Karp Cancer Research Building in Boston, and the Governor Baxter School for the Deaf in Portland ME. Recent solo exhibitions of Garber's work include the Lunder Gallery at Lesley College, Cambridge, MA and the Trustman Gallery at Simmons College in Boston, MA.

She works eclectically, with a passion for using traditional printmaking and painting techniques to express her intensively researched contemporary concerns and concepts. Garber's recent work is installation based. Using player piano scrolls and their boxes as well as the copper plates from which she makes her matrices, and sometimes sound, Randy presents work that expresses what she describes as the "space between silence and sound."

Randy Garber currently teaches drawing, printmaking and professional practices at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design.