Time is both an essential form of measurement that rules our day-to-day lives and a concept that no one quite understands. From the ultrafast zeptosecond to the billions of years that the universe has been in existence, we can easily measure time’s passage. Yet some scientists question whether it is even fundamentally real.
While the concept of time can feel impossible to capture, that hasn’t stopped artist Lia Halloran from trying. Many of her projects tackle how scale and time shift our perception of reality. In her 2022 piece Double Horizon, a 3-channel video installation piece, she projected divergent but closely related images of Los Angeles from a series of repeated flights she made over the city as she learned to fly. In her 2008 work Dark Skate, she skateboarded at night through different venues in Los Angeles, using light to draw an ephemeral line through a series of photographs.
This fall, Halloran has two new exhibits that are part of an expansive art event taking place across Southern California and organized by the Getty, called PST ART: Art & Science Collide. One of those exhibits is a series of oil paintings called Night Watch, which attempts to examine how machines and tools might symbolize the natural passage of time. Another is You, Me, and Infinity, a single work that combines painting and cyanotype—a print made by exposing a UV-sensitive chemical-coated paper to sunlight—to visualize eight layers of scale, from her own growing children to gravitational waves to vacuum fluctuations at the moment of the Big Bang. I spoke with Halloran about using time as a tool to make art and what inspires her.
TIMEKEEPER: Lia Halloran in her studio in Los Angeles. Photo by Adam Ottke.
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In your new collection of paintings called Night Watch, what are you trying to say about time?
I’ve been toying with the notion of calling them “time landscapes.” In many of the pieces, you’ll see something is changing, which means it’s going from one state to the other, whether that’s expanding, contracting, moving. In one, you can see something that references some kind of horizon. It’s not a solid depiction of a mountain or ice, but it absolutely could be. The pieces underneath the horizon are a reference to a crystalline form that’s growing because I was thinking “What’s another earth-bound way that we can reference these long expanses of time?”
Another set basically represents the seasons. There are four of them that rotate through our year. I’m fascinated by how our body itself understands time on larger scales. I really want to invite the viewer to a sense of awe and let them take it from there in a different direction. Even the title itself evokes the viewer’s participation.