Photography, before and after everything else, is a measure of time. The snapshot snatches 1/60th of a second, long-exposures condense hours; a photograph cannot escape the time-sensitive mechanics of its creation. Exploring the bodily experience of time's passage is the focus of my current photographic and video work.

How do we experience the passage of time? While physics may accurately describe a universal space-time, our human experiences seem to defy uniform time on a daily basis: each of us has lived a moment that seemed to last forever or hours that passed by in a heartbeat. Psychology professor Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi explains that such distortions in time occur when individuals are engrossed in "optimal experiences" which he calls Flow. We all find Flow somehow- as athletes "in the zone," as engrossed thinkers, as drivers on hairpin roads- whenever we use our skills to meet a commensurate challenge. Despite 20 years of research into Flow, Csikszentmihalyi is not clear whether the sense of distorted time is "just... a by-product of the intense concentration required for the activity at hand- or whether it is something that contributes in its own right to the positive quality of the experience." From a more subjective perspective, art critic John Berger elaborates on experienced time in his book And our faces, my heart, brief as photos. According to Berger, "deeper" experience of a moment leads to a greater accumulation of experience, so the dissipation of time flow is checked and the moment is lived as longer (pg 35). For both Csikszentmihalyi and Berger, perceived time is not an issue of duration, but of the density of experience.

Why does dense experience yield a sense of temporal elasticity? I turn to the physical body, that portal through which all experience arrives. I propose that the body responds to dense experience by expanding mental focus on the activity at hand, to the exclusion of all other thoughts. Imagine time as water flowing through a pipe at a constant rate. When focus on an activity is limited (or divided across multiple pipes of thought), the narrow pipe forces the water of time to rush quickly. Upon reaching a wider section of pipe, in which all focus is devoted to the activity at hand, the same amount time-water flows more slowly. Increased volume and proportionally decreased velocity yield an unchanged overall rate: the clocks keep ticking.

Although science has left gaps in describing our bodily experience of time, investigations have been carried out by artists too numerous to list. In creating the Intervals series I turned to Caravaggio, especially his painting Death of the Virgin, and more current works by Bill Viola, Karolina Sobecka, and Sam Taylor Wood. I also drew on my own experiences of losing myself in thought, in a household task, in the chaos of my wedding, and in the interminably long, clear moment of a car accident.

It is impossible to explore the vagaries of time without considering the end of time. As artists, our creative output becomes a mausoleum that will house the memory of us. How shocking it is to realize that my personal eternity will last no more than 70-80 years, and may even end tomorrow. Examining distortions in time, those experiences that stretch moments or compress months into minutes, will not let me turn lead into gold or extend my life. Still, these moments are playing over and over at the center of my thoughts.