Time, real & imaginary: an allegory
2018. Projection installation with video tapes and window frame.
Remind me to Remember, OpenHand OpenSpace Gallery, Reading, UK. Curated by Janet Curley Cannon.
Remind me to Remember, OpenHand OpenSpace Gallery, Reading, UK. Curated by Janet Curley Cannon.
Time, Real and Imaginary: an allegory
The title comes from a poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge:
On the wide level of a mountain's head
(I knew not where, but ‘twas some faery place),
Their pinions, ostrich-like, for sails outspread,
Two lovely children run an endless race,
A sister and a brother!
This far outstripp’d the other;
Yet ever runs she with reverted face,
And looks and listens for the boy behind:
For he, alas! is blind!
O’er rough and smooth with even step he pass’d,
And knows not whether he be first or last.
What is our relationship to our present moment in time and our relationship with the passing of time: past or future, memory or imagination? Are we like the brother? Living a blind life where we do not know what the next moment will bring? Yet is this more positive than the sister: always looking backwards into memory?
How does our relationship with time change as we grow older? In childhood and in the stages of adulthood? A frequently resonant text for me right now is a line from Chris Kraus’s: I Love Dick – ‘Playing the vibrations between here and there and then and now’ (written when Kraus was in her 40s as I am now). Time is as an absolute yet as I have grown older it feels utterly elastic. Perhaps the muddle of middle-age comes from not knowing if one is looking forward or looking backward and stretching and bouncing between the two.
On the wide level of a mountain's head
(I knew not where, but ‘twas some faery place),
Their pinions, ostrich-like, for sails outspread,
Two lovely children run an endless race,
A sister and a brother!
This far outstripp’d the other;
Yet ever runs she with reverted face,
And looks and listens for the boy behind:
For he, alas! is blind!
O’er rough and smooth with even step he pass’d,
And knows not whether he be first or last.
What is our relationship to our present moment in time and our relationship with the passing of time: past or future, memory or imagination? Are we like the brother? Living a blind life where we do not know what the next moment will bring? Yet is this more positive than the sister: always looking backwards into memory?
How does our relationship with time change as we grow older? In childhood and in the stages of adulthood? A frequently resonant text for me right now is a line from Chris Kraus’s: I Love Dick – ‘Playing the vibrations between here and there and then and now’ (written when Kraus was in her 40s as I am now). Time is as an absolute yet as I have grown older it feels utterly elastic. Perhaps the muddle of middle-age comes from not knowing if one is looking forward or looking backward and stretching and bouncing between the two.