Momentary (Jack Tar Hotel 3 o’clock) is a small machine sculpture that renders time and sound in visible concert. Set atop a meticulously fashioned butternut wood box, the exposed mechanics of a ‘70s era flip clock cycle through endless twenty-four hour periods at varying speeds. As time either careens or crawls toward 3pm in each irregular cycle, an audio clip is activated, migrating sound from earlier points in The Conversation to play at the clock time of the film’s building action to a murder scene in the Jack Tar Hotel. While the murder is not the climactic moment of the film, it is pivotal to the meaning of the “collected sound” in the film’s larger soundscape and reveals the interpretive pitfalls of the overheard. The arrhythmic clicking of the clock’s progress — where we “hear” minutes and hours, as we might only customarily hear seconds ticking — similarly delivers an aural tug to expectation, but preserves sound’s satisfaction as direct experience.
Exhibition and Performance History: 2020, Art Toronto (Toronto International Art Fair), 2017 Christie Contemporary (Toronto, Canada)
Text: Christie, Claire. “Still.” Christie Contemporary, November 24, 2017.
Work represented by Christie Contemporary
See also: Momentary (Jack Tar Hotel, 3 o’clock), Still (from ‘The Conversation’)