Borrowed Time
Four Lenticular Clocks
Borrowed Time, 2023, edition of 9 + 1 AP, 1 PP
Four, 14 inch, plastic wall clocks, quartz movements, digital lenticular prints.
Image size 12.5 inches diameter.
… the earth of the era of global warming
is precisely a world of insistent, inescapable continuities, animated by forces that are nothing if not inconceivably vast.
– Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement:
Climate Change and the Unthinkable
Borrowed Time is a quartet of four wall clocks representing Pacific, Mountain, Central, and Eastern time zones of the contiguous United States. Inspired by the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists’ annual Doomsday Clocks, the artists altered Staples wall clocks to countdown the climate crisis in seconds. News cycle images flicker and alternate between bucolic before and devastating after images of drought, wildfire, tornadoes, and hurricanes.
Ligorano Reese conceived Borrowed Time in early 2022. “Our goal with this work is to change perceptions of time,” according to Marshall Reese. “Governments and corporations lull us into thinking that global warming is generations away, that the climate crisis is not going to affect us, but it’s happening now.” Nora Ligorano continues, “The clocks have this sense of urgency. We chose catastrophic events that occurred over the past 10 years and that are happening now.”
When the artists began searching image libraries and digital repositories for climate disasters, the frequency and intensity of reoccurring climatic events were overwhelming – almost too many to work with. The artists sourced and licensed photos from government agencies and photojournalists and rendered the lenticular scenes using digital mapping tools and 3D software, framing them in mass-produced, imported plastic clocks.
Pacific Standard Time
Enterprise Bridge, Lake Oroville, California
July 2011, August 2022
Sierra Nevada rain and snow runoff feed the Feather River that flows into Lake Oroville. Oroville Dam created California’s second largest reservoir in 1968 serving water to 27 million people and providing irrigation for almost 5 million acres of farmland. Containing 3.5 million acres of water along 167 miles of shoreline, the lake is popular as a vacation destination and also site of California’s fourth largest power station. In 2021 drought shutdown the lake’s Hyatt hydroelectric plant for the first time in over 40 years of continuous operation.
Photo: California Department of Water Resources
Mountain Standard Time
Marshall Fire, Louisville Colorado,
December 30, 2021
Climate change is the driving force behind the rash of wildfires in the Western U.S. From 1984-2000, 1.69 million acres burned in over 11 states. In 2020 total acreage burned in the West increased to more than 5 times that. On December 30, 2021, hurricane strength winds from the mountains downed power lines and in combination with extreme drought sparked wildfires in Louisville, Colorado. The Marshall Fire burnt over 6,000 acres of land, destroying more than 500 homes and forced the evacuation of over 21,000 people, many of whom may never return to their homes.
Photo: Marc Piscotty
Central Standard Time
Dodge City, Kansas
May 22, 2016
In the first two decades of the 21st century, over 2,000 tornadoes have struck Kansas, the heart of Tornado Alley. From May 22 – 23, 2016, within 24 hours, 40 twisters ravaged the state destroying homes and communities. The frequency and intensity of tornadoes are shifting to the Southern states, a region now known as Dixie Alley, most recently in Mississippi. Scientists have now confirmed that climate change is the primary cause for this shift and likely responsible for the occurrence of tornadoes in greater clusters.
Photo: Dan Robinson, Storm Highway
Eastern Standard Time
Hurricane Sandy
Mantoloking, NJ,
May 2009, November 2, 2012
The largest Atlantic hurricane to date, Hurricane Sandy showed how drastic the effects of the climate crisis will be. The storm caused flooding and mudslides across the Caribbean drowning the entire Eastern U.S. seaboard. The storm inundated streets, deluging tunnels, subway lines and cutting power in New Jersey and New York. When Sandy hit Brigantine, New Jersey, the Category 2 hurricane had sustained winds of over 80 mph. It destroyed more than 300,000 homes.
United States Fish and Wildlife Service Aerial Photography
Greg Thompson, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service
Stormy Weather?
Borrowed Time at Jim Kempner Fine Art
by Larry List
“Everybody talks about the weather but nobody does anything about it…” goes the old cliché passed from weather-stricken farmers of the agrarian past to the increasingly troubled present.
“Take an object. Do something to it. Do something else to it,” said the artist Jasper Johns in explanation of his creative impulse. And so, in their Borrowed Time sculptures, the artists Nora Ligorano and Marshall Reese have taken… ”an object and done something to it and done something else to it” to try to do something about the weather. As Johns presented a Four Seasons ensemble of paintings, they instead present four clocks.
Ligorano and Reese’s four clocks might represent the Ancients’ Four 4 primary elements – Earth, Air, Fire, and Water. With shifting lenticular views of idyllic scenes transformed into disasters, these life-giving elements transform themselves into 4 vengeful Horsemen of the Apocalypse – Drought; Wind; Fire; Flood.
With their 21st century digital timepieces Ligorano and Reese echo Man Ray’s early 20th century analogue metronome Object To Be Destroyed. Affixed to the needle of the metronome, the focal eye of Man Ray’s loved one, symbol of a perfect world, clicks back and forth daring to be destroyed. These digital clocks patiently count down the minutes between the beautiful world seen from one angle on the clock face to the certain destruction of it that we discover in the shift of the lenticular screen images as we pass by.
The tick tock aspect of Ligorano and Reese clock hands is akin to the rhythm Freud identified in the repetitious “Fort – Da” or “Da – Fort” (Here – gone) binary game concept that fascinated his 18-month old grandson and that Freud wrote about in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Freud considered this a method of mastering a painful experience by reproducing it oneself in an active manner, as children so often do, when playing frightening games. And so, here we find the most essential plot trajectory of all, calmly presented by Ligorano and Reese as an apocalyptic version of a children’s game.
None of us would kill ourselves by suddenly plunging into a pool of boiling water, though it has been demonstrated in (now condemned) science labs and thriller movies that a frog will sit calmly in a pan of water as it is slowly heated, a degree at a time, until the frog is boiled to death. Of course, we’re not frogs, but Ligorano and Reese’s clocks ticking one degree at a time ask us to consider “doesn’t the water seem to be getting warmer?”
Borrowed Time at Jim Kempner Fine Art, September, 2023
Larry List is a New York-based writer and curator. He is a contributor to the Man Ray catalogue raisonné, and his essays have appeared in a range of publications, including Duchamp/Man Ray/Picabia (2008), Transformer: The Work of Glenn Kaino (2009), Takako Saito: Dreams to Do (2019), and Jan Fabre: Oro Rosso (2019). His curatorial projects include The Imagery of Chess Revisited, Skin Trade, John Cage & Glenn Kaino: Pieces & Performances, Xanti Schawinsky: Beyond the Bauhaus, Found Language, and Man Ray & Sherrie Levine: A Dialogue Through Objects, Images & Ideas.