A Day Without a Clock
June 2024
Everson Museum of Art
Co-Authored with Amanda Leigh Evans (as part of DeepTime Collective)
Collaborative, interdisciplinary public artwork & performance
Is it possible to live a year, a week, or even a day of everyday life without looking at a clock? This is the question that DeepTime Collective (Amanda Leigh Evans and Tia Kramer) asked themselves at the beginning of their year-long residency at the Everson Museum, which began in June 2023. Through conversation and collaboration with diverse Syracuse community partners, the artists realized that the tyranny of the mechanical clock dictates how we relate to ourselves, our labor, the land, and each other in the modern world.
What is time without a clock?
On Thursday, June 6, 2024 the Everson Museum of Art went one day without mechanical clocks. Everyone who enters the museum (visitors, volunteers and even all museum staff), will be greeted with tools and instructions to cover the clocks on their screens and their wrists. The museum courtyard will be turned into a sundial, performers will visualize witnessing time through one’s body, community participants will have an open dialogue on the shape of time during a time-based lunch, community groups will sing historic timekeeping songs written by laborers in unison, and sand timers will mark the approximate passage of the hours.
The entire event, A Day Without A Clock, is a free or pay-what-you-wish day at the Everson Museum. Full event list can be found here. Join us!
A solo exhibition of the same title is on view at the Beadel Gallery from June 7–August 2024. It will feature ceramic alternative timekeeping devices, ephemera from performances that visualize the shape of time, and artwork generated during a day of participatory events coauthored with diverse community partners.