PICK OF THE WEEK

We are time
We are time
We are time
We are time

We are the thieves of the lost horizons
We are the mirror of the deadly curse

—from "WAT" by Laibach, as found on the album WAT

The wife, the child, and I found ourselves at Quantizing Effects: The Liminal Art of Jim Campbell in a return visit. I was better able to concentrate on some of the pieces that I was only able to briefly glance at last time, due to the energy and lack of focus of the child. Yet, the very pieces that caught my attention this time are directly related to the movement of the child and her relations to environment as well as me. What I thought was masked was lived out in her being and moving and seeing.

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Last Day in the Beginning of March is a darkened "room" filled with twenty-five different lights. Each light is "connected to an electronic circuit containing a fictionalized, digital 'memory' of a specific event" in the last day of the life of the artist's brother. Titles under each light—The Voices, Heart Beating, Windshield Wipers, Car (radio), Vomiting, 31 Matches, A Pack and a Half of Cigarettes—alert the viewer to the rhythms of the flickers of the lights. The effect is one of life deconstructed into component parts, separate experiences, individual lights. The room reconstitutes the parts into a sum, a whole. I just wandered around—reading a title and trying to see in the half-dark which light its cable was attached to—thinking about the title, its words, their meanings, their associations with the rhythm or flicker of the light. I was trying to reconstruct a life with clues difficult to decipher.

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Photo of My Mother is a small glass frame with a picture of the artist's mother that fades in and out of "focus," the picture being pushed close to the glass and then pulled back. A glance down at the control box that it is wired to reveals a small metal plaque that reads: "My Breath / January 1996 1 hour".

Portrait of My Father is a companion piece that is another small glass frame with a picture of the artist's father that fades in and out quicker and in spurts of two. Upon its control box is a metal plate that reads: "My Heartbeat / 12 am to 8 am, January 12th, 1995".

Time becomes personal, familial. Movement through space connects generations as much as DNA, upbringing, events.

We are time.