Time.

There never seems to be enough of it. It is the most precious thing we have.
We hoard it on the busy school day or spend it profligately on a lazy summer afternoon.

We arrange our lives by measuring out Time in seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, and years.  We celebrate our own passages of Time in holidays and anniversaries, and mourn its inevitable passing at funerals, and in our struggle against our own mortality.

As one TV soap opera avows each afternoon: “Like sands through the hourglass, so are the days of our lives.”

The ticking clock and the draining hourglass are universal symbols of time, but artists possess their own varied and unique vocabularies to tackle Time.  In TICK-TOCK, they look at Time’s impact through a range of media and find meaning in the tools that chart Time―clocks, calendars, sundials, hourglasses, digital timekeepers, and time-elapsed video. In their skilled hands these everyday working devices can rise to the level of poetry. The clock becomes a metaphor ― taking the accounts of our daily lives.

At Lehman College, with its ambitious students seeking skills, improved prospects, knowledge, and enlightenment, we might keep in mind the words of the great American educator
Horace Mann:

Lost ―
yesterday,
somewhere between sunrise and sunset,
two golden hours, each set with sixty diamond minutes.
No reward is offered, for they are gone forever.

How we tell the Time is changing. “Reading” the face of a clock with “hands” that point to the minutes that fill an hour is harder for today’s children accustomed to watching the pop-up message of a digital clock, as is “reading” the face of an acquaintance hard for people used to interacting with technology, not other people.  TICK-TOCK: Time in Contemporary Art presents the work of over 40 artists who illuminate Time’s impact through a range of media that shows the traditional and contemporary tools we use to chart Time―clocks, calendars, sundials, hourglasses, digital stopwatches, and time-elapsed video. The artists in the exhibition are: Claudia Baez, David Barnett, Johanna Burke, Kellyann Burns, Art Donovan, Nick Doyle, Mary Engel, Robert Farber, Audrey Flack, Alexandra Forsyth Martinez, Mary Frank, Paul Glabicki, Red Grooms, Richard Haas, Jim Holl, Rachel Lee Hovanian, Timothy Hursley, Mark Innerst, Kysa Johnson, Laura Karetzky, Irena Kenny, Fred Lonidier, Whitfield Lovell, Jean Lowe, Ryan McGinness, Maureen Mullarkey, Walter Murch, Tal R, Chadwick Rantanen, Amanda Ross-Ho, Julia Rothman, Ed Ruscha, John Salvest, Laurie Simmons, Allan Simpson, Jonathan Sims, Steven Spazuk, Christopher Stott, Andrew Super, Allan Tannenbaum, Karen Tompkins, Penelope Umbrico, Federico Uribe, Eleanor White, Agustina Woodgate and Caroline Woolard.

TICK-TOCK looks, too, at social media and online communities, and how they are changing our concept of existing in Time, as we crowd our lives with more and more time constraints. The sound of “tick-tock”  suggests  the mechanical workings of a clock, an object that may soon fade as a reference for us. What will not fade is the role of Time, which plays at the margins and the center of our lives. Time tears at young beauty and limits our mortality, but while we fear Time, we treasure it.  Time marks celebrated moments―an anniversary or a  birthday, as well as the progressing stages of our lives, and the self-direction they demand of us.

Curated by Bartholomew F. Bland, Executive Director, Lehman College Art Gallery

This exhibition is made possible with support from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council; New York City Council through the Honorable Andrew Cohen and the Bronx Delegation; New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature; Milton and Sally Avery Arts Foundation; Jarvis and Constance Doctorow Family Foundation; Edith and Herbert Lehman Foundation; The Pierre and Tana Matisse Foundation; and The New Yankee Stadium Community Benefits Fund.