Total Running Time, Beall Center for Art + Technology, UC Irvine, September 30, 2023 - January 13, 2024
Narrated by Lateef McLeod
Co-written by Cheryl Green
When you enter the gallery, you will find a three-walled room or alcove built into a corner for the installation, “Total Running Time.” The wall on the left is 16 feet long, the center wall is 17 feet long, and the right wall is 12 feet 6 inches long. A dropped ceiling creates an intimate space at 10 feet high. This alcove’s walls are painted “gallery white”å with SWLL10-0-L Tintable White Spartawall Interior Flat Paint, which is bright, smooth, and uniform.
“Total Running Time” includes four discrete works described clockwise throughout the alcove.
“Rescue,” a plaster wall relief, and two geometric forms are positioned on the gallery floor.
The five-foot-high white plaster relief 1/8th inch thick sits on the left gallery wall and spills into the alcove, bending around the back left corner. Because it is so thin and the same white as the walls, it visually goes almost unnoticed, but the shadows that the letters cast help define the letters’ edges and contours. The plaster edges are unfinished and rough to the touch. On the left wall, the relief is shaped into three capital letters: R, E, and S. followed by a character of three thick, horizontally stacked lines that span the back corner, continuing to the back wall. Along the back wall, it also includes a capital C, U. It is an anagram of the word “secure.” Altogether, from the R to the U, the relief is 27 feet long. While most of the letters are elegantly simple with thick lines, upon closer inspection, the center of the U holds the image of a screw with a threaded top in the negative space.
“Pulses,” the ambient sound that pervades the room, is a 15-minute audio recording that runs on a loop with a one-minute silence between each iteration.
Audio sources include a telephone ringing, a mechanical ventilator, a prison telecommunication disclosure announcement, an acapella version of “Unchained Melody,” a switchboard at a call center, and vocal elocution exercises. The sounds are produced through surface transducers mounted from within the gallery walls. A sonic description is included in the artist's documentation.
On the rightmost wall from the entrance is a niche built into the gallery wall, which recedes 4 inches deep and is 19.5 inches tall and 26 inches wide. Perched within the niche are two contained light units at 45 inches high. The units are housed with factory fluorescent tube light sources that generically shine cold. The light source on the left has been manipulated.
This unit has been prepared to mitigate the cool light with a polyester film and diffusion, creating a daylight effect, hence the title “Day for Night.”
This light unit emits a bright amber glow that resembles dawn’s warmer orange light. It runs 24 hours daily. The second, cool light periodically accompanies the warm light throughout the day that sits next to it, on the right. This lightbox maintains the original cool hue and periodically runs for 15 minutes at the tail of every hour during gallery hours. The tubular light sources for both units are covered by a thin translucent material that allows light through but obfuscates the light bulbs themselves. Each unit is built with two 5,000 Kelvin bulbs, regulated by security timers to correspond with a 24-hour day cycle. The light sources are initially designed for people with seasonal affective disorder symptoms and/or low-level access to outdoor light. A warning is provided for anyone with photosensitivity.
Within the center of the room sits two geometric forms that resemble seating, painted with the crisp, smooth gallery white. The forms are the exact dimensions as the horizontal marking situated in the corner of the relief, Rescue, and is an extension of the same work but on the gallery floor. The two forms mirror the character’s two parts but are made three-dimensional: the straight horizontal line from the left side and the line that angles at 45 degrees from the right side. They are exaggerated volumetric forms or like cubes large enough to sit on. Rescue, in its entirety, invites viewers to rest, collapse, lean, or press into their surfaces.