Chronophobia

Now open is a new installation by Rebeca Bashly entitled Chronophobia. Along with Jo Ellsmere's brilliant Biomechanical (which concludes its run on February 29, read here), the piece marks the welcome return of programming to Dividni Shostakovich's Split Screen Installation Space, which he discusses on his blog post about Chronophobia here.

From a psychological standpoint, "chronophobia" refers to the fear of time itself, or the passage of time. For Rebeca, what is reflected in her work may have a broader context: "It's not the fear of the future," she explained, but rather "that time will pass, and you will not be able to do things you thought you would — you see that time already ran over some things, and you can't take it back."

At Chronophobia, three stone platforms rise sequentially higher into the air. All are in a state of decay, with the highest the best preserved and the lowest the most crumbling; chunks of rock often break from each to tumble into the sea below. Covering the top surface of each platform is a large sundial, and in place of the traditional gnomon (the arm that casts shadows upon the face of the dial, thereby showing the time) are skeletons that serve the same purpose: on the lowest level a heart, then the mythical winged horse Pegasus, then a nuclear family — a man in recline nestling a woman, she in turn protecting the skeleton of an unborn child within her. These symbols of hope and life are now but forlorn shadows, lost to time. Of the skeletal heart, Rebeca added, "I think that it is the hardest thing — the realization that the heart has no spine, but somehow we never stop demanding for it to grow one."

Rebeca suggests using [NB]-MistyDay-4pm for the environment, but she would have preferred a dynamic setting that would have allowed the sun's shadow to travel across the dials. (Parcel limitations apparently came into play.) Perhaps significantly, with [NB]-MistyDay-4pm Pegasus looks directly into the setting sun. The images in this blog post (click on any to zoom in) used a custom setting designed to mirror the green hues of the skeletons. Chronophobia will remain on display through the end of April.