The Time Switch series arises from my efforts to maintain a view of existence, specifically time, that transcends conventional bounds. I want to do this because regarding time from a range of perspectives can prompt reconsideration of what is important - a resetting and recalibration of priorities for our brief lives.  Astronomer Carl Sagan spoke of the Voyager mission’s 1990 photograph showing Earth as a tiny, pale blue dot:  our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. …It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world.

In a similar way, the 1968 film "Powers of Ten" from Charles & Ray Eames considers one subject from a vast range of scales, from the microscopic to the cosmic; the film is now shown in schoolrooms across the world, presumably because it ruptures normative consciousness by revealing the blossoming plurality within that which may appear singular.

I like to think that with Time Switch I am following a similar course for my generation.  Now, thanks in large part to information technology, we have a more nuanced and sophisticated understanding of space.  Virtual presence can be an acceptable, or even preferable, alternative to physical presence; gaining this choice is gaining mental power.   In contrast, our relationship to time, despite all our talk of “time management,”  remains largely uncritical, even unconsidered.  I want to complicate our singular view of time as an effort toward attaining greater mental freedom.

To do this, I start at the nexus of a cemetery and a quarry, a place where a life merges into the epic scale of geologic time.  The limestone quarry is a mass of countless creatures, fossilized under an inland sea that has since vanished.   That stone is now being removed and processed into plaster, concrete and other materials.   Thinking about this place and its implications can lift us outside of the “box” of our own lifespan as a frame of reference, and into the field of the wider world.   I push this movement further by setting up several points of view through imagery from my personal experience, perhaps in the manner of the Eames’s film.   “Powers of Ten” demonstrates that there exist myriad spaces within space, and reminds us that perspective is always a matter of personal choice.  I am attempting to do the same with regard to time – to shake up conventional viewpoints and to restore a sense of the multivalent and even arbitrary nature of our concepts.   I hope that these images can function like Sagan’s photograph, and that our taking the long (even very long) view of our place in time may challenge delusions and prompt productive reconsiderations.

November 2010