Time is of the Essence
2025
Morgan Lugo
Stainless steel, acrylic
Time is of the Essence is a fully functioning sundial and sculptural installation that mimics how the brain perceives and maps time and space while actively telling time in space. Built with three conceptual layers of mirrored stainless steel and laser-cut acrylic, the sculpture casts an almost 50-foot rainbow spectrum neuron map that shifts throughout the day, physically embodying the passage of time.
Each layer holds meaning: the outer stainless shell is a neuron map reflecting both inward and outward; the middle acrylic layer maps all the sculptures across Franconia Sculpture Park; the innermost layer maps constellations above the site. As light passes through these lattices, the shadows create new synaptic hues representing both neural and communal connection. These colors shift throughout the day and across the seasons, marking not just the hour, but the passage of multiple temporalities: personal, collective, planetary. The sculpture maps moment, movement, memory, and interaction all at once.
Ultimately, Time is of the Essence embodies the illusion of permanence through the lens of perception, reflection, and layered being. The intention is to experience your own reflection layered with others’, to see yourself both within and outside of time. The piece reveals that time is not a single clock, but a constellation of perception that is woven together by the brain, the body, and the world around us. It reminds us that everything we think of as real (time, space, self) is constructed from overlapping illusions, made tangible only through presence.
Morgan Lugo
Morgan Lugo is a Sicilian and Puerto Rican sculptor based in Atlanta, Georgia, whose work explores how memory, perception, and shared experience shape the construction of reality. Following her recovery from a traumatic brain injury, Lugo became deeply interested in how the mind forms, fragments, and reconstructs memory. Sculpture emerged as both a physical and conceptual tool for navigating these questions, translating cognitive, sensory, and emotional experience into material form.
Lugo’s work examines parallels between neurological systems and larger cosmic structures, revealing how patterns of connection repeat across vastly different scales, from the internal networks of the mind to the terrestrial systems of the natural world to the expansive structures of the universe. Drawing from neuroscience, astrophysics, Indigenous star lore, and theoretical physics, she constructs sculptural frameworks that mirror the architecture of perception itself. Recurring forms, such as lattice networks and hexagonal prisms, echo neural pathways, mycorrhizal webs, and the filamentary structures of the cosmic web, suggesting that the same organizing principles shaping inner experience also structure the world around us.