Broken Measure

Digital photomontage; Xerox prints assembled as scrolls; glass jar with blue paint (2018)

In the pandemonium of image I present you with the universal Blue. Blue, an open door to soul—an infinite possibility becoming tangible.     —Derek Jarman

Do figureless images unfold in time; are they filmic or photographic, moving or still? Can time be blue, is there a blue of time? Could one image a blue temporality, marking and measuring time in blue?    —Akira Mizuta Lippit

Received as a time-score, the work emerges from thinking about how the photographic image stages rhythm and interruption, and how the medium of xerography, with its photoconductive reliance on light, records that process. The scroll is composed of digital key-frame photos of broken lines and bodily gestures, sliced into narrow vertical bands.

In film history, blue carries a photochemical memory of time (cyanotype, early blue-sensitive stocks) and a perceptual memory of the “blue hour” or atmospheric distance. Broken Measure explores this blue time, letting the monochromatic photographic scroll converse with a single blue jar that anchors chroma and duration.