“Time to Leave”

The newest addition to Snyder’s “Angels, Saints, and Muses” series

The first thing one notices in Dan Snyder’s “Time to Leave” is the golden frame. Its surface gleams with the promise of reverence, recalling Byzantine icons, Renaissance altarpieces, or reliquary fragments meant to contain something holy. Yet Snyder deliberately unsettles this expectation. Inside the frame, there is no image of perfection, no radiant saint or angel frozen in eternal wholeness. Instead, we encounter a body broken into pieces—ceramic shards, some glazed, some rough, with the bottom fragments scarred by melted glass. Across the composition, a single iron rod slices diagonally outward, breaking the frame’s authority.

The figure these pieces suggest is fragile, incomplete, caught between material presence and absence. Is it rising, or disintegrating? The ambiguity is deliberate, and it is exactly this refusal of resolution that makes the piece feel so much of our moment.

We are living, after all, in fractured times. The past decade has seen institutions crumble, certainties erode, and faith in permanence dissolve. Climate catastrophe, political polarization, war, and epidemic all underscore the same lesson: continuity is not guaranteed. Snyder’s sculpture, with its broken fragments struggling to cohere inside a frame that once promised stability, is a metaphor for this condition.

The body is not whole; it is a body under duress. The folds of the ceramic torso recall both the drapery of classical sculpture and the erosion of stone over centuries—something once complete, now worn down by time. The bottom shards, fused with melted glass, suggest fire, destruction, environmental collapse: matter altered by catastrophe. And the iron rod? It is at once a staff, a weapon, and a line of fracture—anchoring the figure yet pushing against the constraints of the frame.

There is, however, another layer here. The title— “Time to Leave”—infuses the work with mortality. The phrase carries the quiet finality of last words, a recognition of the inevitable departure. But it could just as easily signify urgency: the demand for movement, change, action. In this way, Snyder’s piece holds two truths at once: the inevitability of endings, and the insistence on going forward regardless.

Art-historically, Leave nods to both sacred traditions and modernist fragmentation. The gilded frame summons the aura of the icon, while the fractured body recalls Alberto Giacometti’s attenuated figures, or even Robert Rauschenberg’s assemblages—works that insist on the materiality of the fragment rather than the illusion of wholeness. Yet Snyder’s work feels less like homage than like reckoning. He uses fragments not to suggest loss alone, but to ask what remains possible when wholeness is no longer an option.

This question feels particularly urgent now. We are surrounded by broken systems, broken communities, broken ecologies. And yet, as Snyder shows us, fragments can still cohere into something meaningful. They can still suggest form, gesture, even transcendence. The angel or saint here is not immaculate—it is scarred, precarious, cobbled together—but it is luminous all the same.

Snyder’s “Time to Leave” does not offer consolation in the traditional sense. It does not restore us to unity, or offer a polished image of redemption. Instead, it insists on the beauty and necessity of acknowledging fracture. By suspending the body in tension between coherence and collapse, Snyder articulates a new kind of devotion—one appropriate to an age when the sacred is found not in perfection, but in persistence.

The work leaves us with a paradox. The title tells us it is time to leave, to depart. But the piece itself lingers, haunting, refusing to be dismissed. Like our own troubled times, it resists resolution. And yet in its brokenness, it gestures toward resilience, toward the possibility of carrying fragments forward, luminous and unresolved.