Public Art: It’s about time (2023)

Context

Using common idioms that refer to time, this series of installations invites visitors to Raleigh parks and community centers to consider the differences between how time is measured and how one experiences it.

Exhibition Text

Imagine every clock stopped, would time stand still?

The words we use to talk about time shape time as finite, concrete, and transactional. That is also often how we think of time. Our time is structured by schedules, alerts, deadlines, timelines, punch clocks, calendars, hourly rates, time zones, alarms, timetables. Seconds, minutes, hours days march in one direction.

But does time move in one direction? Could it fold back on itself? Is it a cycle, a loop, a spiral, a pendulum?

Life, human or otherwise, is structured by sunrise after sunset, sunset following sunrise, moon cycles, seasons, tides, migrations, cellular regeneration, birth, death, decay, and birth again. These rhythms move in repeating cycles, circling back, repeating, and spiraling.

We have become estranged from the ocean’s syncopated swells; what will it take to escape the confines of the matrix of time?

Is government-sanctioned recreation and leisure a door into a world in which time is no longer a commodity?

How do you spend your time or save time?

How do you take time or take back time?

How do you make time or make up time?