Above: Central Time Clock
Artist Statement
Within the spirit of care and conviviality, Josephine Sales works through moving image, sculpture, text, and sound proposing questions, yearnings and learnings on disability, debility, dependency, and disablement. Sales has presented work at Palais de Tokyo, Paris, Kai Matsumiya, New York, MCA Chicago and The Shed, New York. Sales lives and works in New York City is a San Francisco State University alum and received an MFA in Photography from Milton Avery School of the Arts, Bard College.
Works
- Rescue, 2023: plaster wall relief, mdf, SWLL10-0-L Tintable White Spartawall Interior Flat Paint
- Pulses, 2023: digital audio, surface and tactile transducers, total running time 15 minutes
- Day for Night, 2023: two prepared 5000 kelvin circadian optic light panels, two security timers, polyester film filters
- Total Running Time Site, 2023: auxiliary exhibition site available on loan at <beallcenter.uci.edu/totalrunningtime>
Project Description
Total Running Time is an installation comprised of four distinct works:
Rescue, an anagram of the word ‘secure,’ spans two walls in a 5-foot tall shallow plaster relief. Two geometric forms that mirror characters in the relief can be used as seating. This work asks viewers to consider their relationship to crisis and care.
Pulses is a fifteen-minute telephone call through the prison telecommunication system, the maximum length permitted for calls between an incarcerated person and the “free world.” The piece vibrates through transducers embedded within the wall. This tactile sonic arrangement is punctuated by periodic reminders that the telephone line is being surveilled and counts down the remaining call duration.
Day for Night, an expanded cinema work, is two clocks that illuminate the room, made of two prepared 5000 kelvin circadian optic light panels generically used to mimic sunshine. It runs on two security timers. Viewers are invited to experience sunlight on two different timelines: the first, a constant 24-hour day; the second, once an hour.
Total Running Time Site is an auxiliary exhibition site and digital sourcebook available on loan to Beall Center for Art + Technology, UC Irvine, for an extended period beyond the exhibition run. The site is available through the university domain and invites remote and site-specific engagement.
Across these works, Total Running Time explores temporalities of care, abstracting the halted rhythms of the day and strictly controlled telecommunications for incarcerated people. Scrambled text, interrupted messages, light without sun: Sales uses these gestures of disrupted social and sensorial experience to interrogate the material entanglements of incarceration, disabled life, labor, and the extraction of time.
Process Archive
Central Time Clock
An image of the exterior door of “Central Time Clock,” a labor-time tracking device provider that boasts “helping effectively manage employees and control labor costs.”
Sonic study
An image of a white document depicting six different illustrations- two wide by three tall. Each illustration depicts a rough waveform for a corresponding sound. The sounds are [thump], [breathing], [ringing] short pulses l/r delay, [touchtone], [triggering] operator, and [constant] voice 1.
Time shred
An image of the rear door of an 18-wheeler trailer on the road. Black printed text is obstructed by vertical frames. The text reads “Time Shred Services inc. Mobile Document Destruction, www.timeshred.com, 718 875-1200, 1800 989-8463”.
World
An image of a pale, off-white piece of sheet metal with decal residue spelling the word “world”. The metal’s screws line the left edge of the image.
Total Running Time Site
Total running time in cinematic terms refers to the duration of a moving image work, implying a beginning, middle, and end. This assumption of linear time draws on capitalist and ableist notions of productivity. Capitalism produces ‘disability’ through exclusion as a category with its own orientation to time and modes of production. What is a time that includes the expanses of illness or disability? What is a time that accounts for the duration within carceral institutions and premature loss due to state violence? Within the exhibition format, ‘Total Running Time’ documents the material entanglements between incarceration, disabled life, labor, and the extraction of time. Total Running Time comprises four works Rescue, an anagram of the word ‘secure,’ spans two walls in a 5-foot tall shallow plaster relief accompanied by two geometric forms large enough to sit on. Rescue invites viewers to contemplate their relationships to crisis and care. Pulses is a fifteen-minute telephone call through the prison telecommunication system, the maximum length permitted for calls between an incarcerated person and the free world. The piece vibrates through transducers embedded within the wall. This tactile sonic arrangement is punctuated by periodic reminders that the telephone line is being surveilled and counts down the remaining call duration. Day for Night, an expanded cinema work, is two clocks illuminating the room, made of prepared 5K kelvin circadian optic light panels generically used to mimic sunshine. It runs on two security timers. Viewers are invited to experience sunlight on two different timelines: the first, a constant 24-hour day; the second, once an hour. Total Running Time Site is an auxiliary exhibition site and digital sourcebook available on loan to Beall Center for Art + Technology, UC Irvine, for an extended period beyond the exhibition run. The site is available through the university domain and invites remote and site-specific engagement. Each work on the digital platform is a companion to artworks on view between September 30, 2023, and January 13, 2024. Across these works, Total Running Time explores temporalities of care, abstracting the halted rhythms of the day and strictly controlled telecommunications for incarcerated people. Scrambled text, interrupted messages, light without the sun: using gestures of disrupted social and sensorial experience to interrogate the material entanglements between incarceration, disabled life, labor, and the extraction of time.
Sketchbook 11, Sketch of Two Clocks, 1986 by Donald Rodney
An image of white text on a dark blue background with a white border. The text reads, “One clock is inscribed ‘Past’ and ‘Imperfect’. The other clock is inscribed ‘Future looks’”
Fourth Amendment AI
An image depicting a computer node map of 40 AI response choices around the Fourth Amendment.
Haptics in wall
A photo of a printed document titled “Jim Crow: Disability, Dis-Location, and the School-to-Prison Pipeline'' next to a handwritten note which reads, “haptics into wall??” The note also has a small hand-drawing of a rectangle on it.
Ice Light
An image depicting six photographs laid out on a piece of wood. Each of the six photos show a large rectangular slab of ice in a sink and in front of a freezer. In the first two photographs, the ice slabs are illuminated by an orange light.
Mouser policy
A document outlining “Mouser Electronics” standards on slavery and human trafficking in the supply chain.
Power Generation
An image depicting the side of a tan-colored building with the text “Power Generation” written in black on its face.
Pulses still
An image of a video still with a solid gray background. Closed caption text with a yellow fill and black outline reads “to refuse this call, press 2 [a slight crackle on the line]”.
Rescue material study
An image of a grey, smooth surface with a pile of grey powder and transparent, spherical beads in varying sizes. The beads appear to glow.