A Day Without A Clock

Is it possible to live a year, a week, or even a day of everyday life without looking at a clock? This is the question that DeepTime Collective (Amanda Leigh Evans and Tia Kramer) asked themselves at the beginning of their year-long residency at the Everson Museum, which began in June 2023. Through conversation and collaboration with diverse Syracuse community partners, the artists realized that the tyranny of the atomic clock dictates how we relate to ourselves, our labor, the land, and each other in the modern world.

What is time without a clock?

This exhibition follows DeepTime Collective’s immersive museum-wide day event, A Day Without a Clock, taking place on June 6, 2024. The exhibition features ceramic alternative timekeeping devices, ephemera from performances that visualize the shape of time, and artwork generated during a day of participatory events coauthored with diverse community partners. When combined, these alternative timekeeping objects and participatory activities reorient our relationship to time.

As part of the day-long event on June 6, 2024, everyone who entered the museum (visitors, volunteers, and even all museum staff) was greeted with tools and instructions to cover the clocks on their screens and their wrists. The museum courtyard was turned into a sundial, performers embodied visual representations of time passing through one’s body, community participants hosted open dialogues on the shape of time during a time-based lunch, historic timekeeping songs by laborers were sung by community groups in unison, and sand timers marked the approximate passage of the hours.