Ground Zero

Ground Zero, 2019, Central Memorial Library partnered with Stride Gallery and presented as a part of Sled Island Music Festival, Calgary, AB.

Steel, plaster, gold paint, stepper motor

60 clock hands move once per second to complete one 60-second rotation. One clock rotates clockwise and the other rotates counterclockwise.

Text by Sasha Semenoff

There is something inexplicable about Ground Zero as signifier. It is rooted simultaneously in horror and irony, in
both the unspeakable and the so-far unspoken -- in what can’t be undone and what has yet to be done. Quick
associations are an inescapable aspect of encountering language, of employing it. The same could be said of time, the
myriad ways we decipher it, attempt to grasp its senseless curve, translate it into form. This disconnect appears in the
ways we glance in passing at our watches, round up to the top of the hour when answering with the time, or in the way
all the clocks in our homes and cars slowly slip from standard, from nuclear time, daring us to account for the
difference.

Here we encounter a swirling nexus of concrete abstractions. Images of doomsday clocks, nuclear anxieties, notions of
catastrophic rupture all coexist parallel to more immediate and human implications: no-body can escape. Felix
Gonzalez Torres’ twin clocks slowly ticking out of sync over years come to mind. But the political shadow of recent
histories looms large, obfuscating the individual. So we arrive at Ground Zero as both place and absence, and despite
the best efforts of a collective impulse to memorialize, it remains unstable.

The monuments here, if they can be considered as such, subvert scale. Both larger than human life, but so much
smaller than any overtly permanent fixtures, they memorialize the futility of the very act of memorialization. The
gold-lacquer veneer suggests something ersatz: a bellboy concierge cart, a stainless steel structure gilded in gold-leaf,
a pioneer plaque hurled hopelessly into the void. Physical humour tempers the temporal angst. In this context, a clock
that ticks counter is a device for mitigating impermanence, at the very least meeting it halfway. Precision is seen as a
cumulative myth, but one worthy of ornament. The negative space above the clock faces is an affront to design, more
barrier than invitation.

These are not instruments for re-orienting oneself, they are a destabilizing presence that take up space and suggest
time.

– Sasha Semenoff