Stephen Wadner

Clocks are ubiquitous in this electronic, digital culture that we find ourselves living in. In addition to wearing a watch on our wrist we may also pack around a smart phone or electronic tablet which provides us with information about the date and the time of day. Our home computers keep track of the time, automatically updating for that annoying change to and from daylight savings time twice a year. Our automobiles not only track where we are going and where we have been but they also keep track of when we were there. Many home appliances have clocks programmed into them, everything from our big screen television sets and DVR players to our microwave ovens and range tops. Our modern lives require that we pay this close attention to the exact time of day in order to maintain our busy, multi-tasking life styles and it seems to me that now it takes a very deliberate and conscious effort to actually 'lose track of time' and become free of the obsessive, conscious awareness of what time of day it is.

 

And  although I am adding even more clocks to this temporal overload I am not interested in just simply providing another way of telling what time of day it is. I am interested in exploring the nature of time, our perception of time and how we relate personally to time. How we can obsess about the past or the future even though we can only really experience the present; how we can anticipate an event tomorrow or next weekend with excitement but how we also stress over impending deadlines; how a moment of pleasure seems so brief but a moment of sorrow can seem so long.  Thoughts and ideas about time are explored more completely in some of my clocks than in others, but I hope that each of my clocks will help the viewer to pause and reflect on the ambiguities and paradoxes in the nature of time and to enjoy the time we have.  

 

My clocks are constructed using recycled and repurposed materials, which follows a long tradition of using 'found objects' to create art. Traditions such as Folk Art and Bricolage and artists such as Marcel Duchamp and Robert Rauschenberg. My work is a contemporary reflection on the compulsive nature of our modern consumer culture and an awareness of the rapid depletion of our natural resources.  I feel very comfortable using junk and trash as a creative medium. I like the sense of frugality and thrift that it imparts to my work. It creates opportunities for inventiveness and humor. There is a concept associated with education that predicts that expectations affect the performance of students; higher expectations will lead to excelled performance, lower expectations will lead to decreased performance. This is know as the Pygmalion Effect. I am exploring the possibility that by placing high expectations on the 'trash' that I use in my work and by using it with quality of design and fine craftsmanship the intrinsic low value of the 'trash' will be elevated and the overlooked aesthetics it possesses will become evident.