William Eakin

Anyone familiar with William Eakin’s methodology will know that he is something of a cultural anthropologist, one who traces a moment through artifact and reads popular culture as the barometer of the collective psyche. Through singular attention to the thing itself paired with contextual erasure, he dignifies the dispossessed and obsolete of material pop culture by giving complexity to the easy digestibility of kitsch. His curatorial eye for the art of ubiquity gives a nod to Pop Art, but without the irony, which I think the artist would consider a kind of betrayal to the integrity of the object. In Eakin’s recent exhibition, “24Hours” at Toronto’s Stephen Bulger Gallery, the objects of triviality elevated to reverence are handless watch faces of various design and vintage. The removal of time’s tick would assumingly turn one’s attention toward form without the distraction of function, however by stilling time our attention is brought to this dimension, as Eakin illustrates that the pause is exactly what is needed to comprehend it.

When the hands on a mechanical watch stop you wind it, and in doing so enjoy the fact of being a necessary part of time’s movement. In those tiny circular motions reinitiating analog time, there is a pause empty enough to allow for momentary meditation; a thinking that is often based on what has past, rather than what needs to be done. Analog time seems more elegantly measured than digital; its circuitous movement more transparent, connecting us, consciously or not, with temporality in a grander sense or to history with a capital H. As an artist who understands era through object, Eakin also senses how time is variously filtered through apparatus: time in digital is forward marching while analog is looping. And through the apparatus by which he charts the world—the camera—he manages to compress time by eliminating the trace of narrative on either edge of the photograph’s frame. In Augustinian terms, we would understand these compositions as a framing of the now, that part of time we grasp through attention. However, through the decisive framing of the watch face Eakin plays with a more Einsteinian notion of time, which depends on a spatial frame of reference and human perception, producing on the observer a kind of flattening of time.

In talking with the artist, Eakin explains that “24Hours” is an investigation into two notions of time: “deep time” and nostalgia. Deep time, or “time beyond time,” as he defines it, has geological applications in understanding the earth’s origins as a layered construction rather than laid out in a linear timeline. The scientists who concern themselves with this topic admit that the concept of time is so profound that metaphor is the only way in which it can be comprehended. Here, in Eakin’s collection, the trace of earthly origin is written in an elegant rhetorical visual language of watch faces resembling the sun, moon and celestial bodies— each work casting a signature glow. These compositions have the analog effect of segmenting time so that one manageably reads the story as a succession of paragraphs rather than wrestling with the entire epic at once.

The oldest watch face in the present series, a model heralding from 18th-century Netherlands, illustrates another version of Genesis through the depiction of an Adam and Eve narrative. This piece in particular highlights a reflection of the vanitas still-life tradition of the Dutch 17th century—the origin of human mortality being a major underpinning of vanitas representations. However, beyond the theme of this specific piece, “24Hours” as a whole presents a modern take on the vanitas tradition. By placing emphasis on the time-worn timepiece, a miniature architectural ruin, Eakin, like the Dutch masters, invites us to consider the preciousness and evanescence of both earthly objects and life itself. The medium of the message in “24Hours,” however, is more a gospel celebration than cautionary sermon.

The two baseball themed watch faces are an investigation of the nostalgic notion of time. For Eakin, sports rather than Hollywood represents the more interesting arena for the cultivation of pop-culture heroism, and in 1930s America baseball is played in a mythical stadium. And anyone who knows baseball knows that it is a game of pause and signal, of rotation and repetition, offering a pedestal of dizzying heights of American-made majesty from which the hero will ultimately fall. This too is another form of deep time, measured in mountains and valleys and layers of personal history. At this point Eakin’s work turns slightly from archive to memoir, as he gauges the arc between now and then; a slivered geometry that with each passing year becomes all the more fragile as the anchor of relative past nudges forward and the collective psyche becomes increasingly fixed on the contemporary. In offering so many variations on the theme, some which hover at the surface and others buried at greater depths, William Eakin offers the optimistic wisdom, rather than dour warning, that time is indeed what one makes of it. ❚

“24Hours” was exhibited at the Stephen Bulger Gallery in Toronto from September 21 to October 19, 2013.

Tracy Valcourt writes and studies in Montreal.