Throughout his career, Vienna-based artist John Gerrard has continually explored the relationship between structures and their environments by charting the melancholic demise of our mechanical investments. His current exhibition, Cuban School, on view at NYC’s Simon Preston Gallery, is no exception; working from extensive photographs and topographical satellite data, Gerrard has re-constructed a simulated portrait of a school in Havana, Cuba, which we observe through the virtual lens of an unflinching 360-degree camera’s orbit. Steadily circling the structure that sits heavy, like a dinosaur’s skeleton, amidst vacant agricultural expanses, the projection is self-generating, continuously adjusting itself to engage with its viewers’ temporal reality. As the moments of a day piece themselves together — as the morning light softens, the afternoon light lengthens, as winter days grow shorter and summer days languish — so does Gerrard’s virtual world render itself: the sun moves appropriately, the dusk outside the gallery is mirrored and re-articulated in the dusk which settles like dust around the school. His footage is a veritable open system with an infinite duration, a post-cinematic performance of the passage of a year as it inflects this abandoned relic of a time gone-by.