Hitchcock’s Rope

49 X 37 inches, colored pencil and graphite on paper

In this drawing, I explore my personal sense of time and its relation to 'real' time, inspired by how Hitchcock manipulates perceptions of time in his film Rope. In the movie, the skyline light fades more quickly than in real life, but as viewers, we perceive the onset of night as occurring in real time. Consequently, we experience time as passing more slowly than it actually does in the film. The concept of 'mind time' has always fascinated me—how we intuitively wake up, unconsciously interpret visual stimuli as temporal context, and how the physical world influences our sense of time.

For this drawing, I decided to test my own perceptions of time: Over several weeks, at various points, I attempted to guess the correct time. I then recorded this guess in the drawing and compared it to the actual time shown on my studio clock. I used the discrepancy—the 'time error'—to mark points on a grid I had drawn over much of the paper. Minutes off from the real time were translated into spaces between colored diamonds. My timed guesses and the resulting differences are noted around the drawing. If my guess was before or after the actual time, I created a pattern on the grid (the concentric circles and shapes) in either a warm or cool color. I continued this process in a clockwise motion from the center outward, until the shapes began to intersect with the noted times. Then, I connected these patterns and further developed the form. The movements of the external shapes and arrows are counterclockwise. The entire piece is a time machine, rooted in my temporal fallibility.