the timekeeper’s meditation
durational performance & installation
by Lindsey Barlag Thornton
premiered:
SAIC's New Blood Festival
Links Hall, Chicago
November, 2013
remount:
8 hour durational performance &
installation on view as part of
Mind the Gap Exhibition
curated by Steve Juras
Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago
August, 2014
photos by Claire Demos
Using the troubled voyage of Ernest Shackleton's "Endurance" as a metaphorical/symbolic departure point, the work explores our relationship to the dissonance between objective and subjective time. One hundred pounds of ice slowly melts atop a hand-made wood table, dripping into tin buckets, as my body is present on the ice for the duration of hours. At various intervals a text is read aloud, meditating on time, past, present, and future happening simultaneously as ice melts, and as I keep time throughout the duration of a day—seconds…minutes…and hours—as they are actually experienced and surreally imagined. Audience members are free to come and go, engaging with both material and performer.