NADA New York 2023

Joel Kyack’s new video TIME TIME TIME opens with a pair of lines from Sylvia Plath: It is only time that weighs upon our hands. / It is only time, and that is not material. It’s a choice perfectly fitting in its poetic irony, because in what follows it becomes clear that for Kyack, as for Plath, the question of time’s materiality—both in the sense of its relevance and in the sense of its thingness—weighs heavy on the hands indeed.

In the course of Kyack’s video, we encounter various methods of measuring time that humans have devised, from the sundial to the hourglass to the count of beats per minute. Time is money. Time is space. Yet in dwelling on these technical and hermeneutic devices, Kyack focuses our attention on the fundamental mediation of each, how each approximates time’s passing differently and with different cognitive effects. George Kubler made note of this in The Shape of Time. For Kubler, “actuality is when the lighthouse is dark between flashes: it is the instant between the ticks of the watch.” In other words, the actual present moment, “the void between events,” is all we can ever know directly. Everything else is mediation and mediation is always subject to the pressures of power. In Kyack’s work, that power may be as diffuse as capitalism itself, or it may be more particular, as in the role of Youtube in the culture of moving images or in the scientific consensus around special relativity. By examining the temporal channels through which thought and experience flow, Kyack ultimately zooms us out to the celestial scale, pausing at the moment in which the cosmic nature of time butts up against our grasping means of making sense of it.

This interest in mediation itself reflects Kyack’s wider practice, which employs a rough and ready approach to found objects in kinetic sculptures, installations, assemblages, and videos that interpret the largest of social forces through the humblest of materials.