Written By Charlie M. Case
I always adore, at some wrong time of year, coming across a piece of art—be it music or media or story—that evokes a far-off season. Hearing an October song in June always strikes me with the most delightful timeless sensation: some parts nostalgia, some anticipation.
That said, I’d like to offer you a few art recommendations which feel quintessentially their time of year, to be consumed in or out of season, at your discretion.
Spring
This is How You Lose the Time War is a sci-fi novel that spans huge swathes of time, forwards and back. It can’t be said to literally be set in spring, but I would firmly say it feels like spring.
The book is an epistolary romance. It also muses on choice, stagnance, and political struggle. Beneath its overt themes, though, it sings of newness, change, growth and cultivation. It is suffused with hope. Its narrators are both taking a chance, reaching for each other, and they take that chance again, and again, and again. If ever, in the depths of winter, I needed some spring light, to this book I would turn.
Summer
Hong Hong (pictured) is an interdisciplinary artist whose creations are abstract, enormous, and visually entrancing. I had the pleasure of attending her 2018 exhibition at Real Art Ways in Hartford, CT, and was there met with Segment 5, a paper exhibit, far larger than I was tall and so bright and rising it seemed to emanate heat.
This piece has occupied a space in my mind for six full years now. I did not first see it in the summer, but to me it evokes summer: it feels like red desert rock, wide blue skies, heatwaves and the so-brief coolness of summer mornings, cut quick by the sunrise. See how the artwork itself seems to rise.
Fall
Over the Garden Wall, a TV miniseries, is a show that many would agree encapsulates the feeling of fall. It is filled to the brim with autumn leaves and pumpkins and thematic representations of harvest and death; perfect for the season.
The series is charming, too, for its surrealism. Fall has that sort of sensation to it—that you’re right on the edge of reality; that anything might be a dream, or a ghost, or all too terribly true. Over the Garden Wall embraces the line between the literal and the figurative, as well as the line between cozy and eerie; a perfect mix of sensation that is utterly autumn.
Winter
Lastly, “Aglow” is a single by The Rare Occasions, my personal favorite band. This song is the first of theirs I ever came across, sometime around 2019. I’ve loved their music ever since.
Between its icy cover art and its frostbitten lyrics, “Aglow” is textually wintry, but its sound is also evocative of the season—it has a lilting, tinkling beginning that feels like ice, or sun sparkling on snow. There’s a sort of haunting to it, too, like too-still winter nights. It always makes me shiver.
There—a recommendation for every season. Add them to your annual rotation, if you like, or look in on them out of season to catch a glimpse of the future and past. Either way, enjoy.