(L.A. in N.Y.)
Jesse Stecklow at Dracula’s Revenge

Jesse Stecklow, Cornspearacies (installation view) (2024). High fructose corn syrup; Avon Golden Harvest Hand Lotion bottles and lotion; beeswax candles; Lemonlights (beeswax, LED light bulbs, lamp bases, and hardware); jam jars; glass; UV print on acrylic; corian; springs; and fans; dimensions variable. Image courtesy of the artist and Dracula’s Revenge, New York and Sweetwater, Berlin. Photo: Jason Mandella.

An analog clock hung in the back of Dracula’s Revenge, an itinerant art gallery operating in Lower Manhattan, as one of seven sculptures by Los Angeles-based artist Jesse Stecklow displayed in his solo exhibition, Timekeepers. Known as Untitled (10:10:44) (2023), this clock, like some of Stecklow’s previous works, was outfitted with air samplers —cylindrical devices used to collect air for quality testing. These were lodged in front of the clock’s hour, minute, and second hands, blocking their rotation. While the work’s assessment of New York’s air quality was inaccessible during its exhibition, Untitled (10:10:44) drew a subtle connection between clocks and toxicity, invoking both the technologies of mechanized timekeeping that jumpstarted the nineteenth-century industrial revolution and the deleterious effects on air quality that resulted from this rapid development.¹ More occlusive than revelatory, Timekeepers pointed wryly to our misconceptions about history and progress in the face of anthropogenic climate change and proposed, through its formal eccentricities, that we re-envision time not as a narrative of progress but as a process of material and linguistic transformation.

In the main exhibition space, five altar-like assemblages on fiberboards wrapped in paper corresponded to the ancient past, recent past, present, future present, and deep future.² The first, From Ear to Ear (2024), featured a pair of bone conduction headphones that played an ocean-themed meditation. Sitting beside it were the fossilized inner ear bones of a whale—two wrinkly specimens, scatological in shape and coloration. Further research prompted by these specimens revealed that human noise pollution contributes to whales’ endangerment by disrupting many species’ ability to hunt and communicate via echolocation. ³ Juxtaposed with the meditation track, the excised fossils reminded viewers, with clinical brutality, that our relationship with these marine mammals is far from reciprocal.

Tongue-in-cheek vinyl labels accompanied Stecklow’s assemblages, each an anagram of the exhibition’s title: From Ear to Ear was tagged “timekeepers,” and the next work, From Pipe to Light (2024)—which featured, among other curios, a drained vintage aftershave bottle—was marked “empties reek.” Deeper in the narrow gallery, Database (empty) (2022), which comprises metal nails protruding from a silkscreen print of an empty data set, was labeled “re-meet spike,” a phrase that (along with the nails in the assemblage) alludes to golden spikes—geological features in the earth’s sediment that we use to identify past climatic shifts⁴ Fittingly, the six faint parallel lines representing the empty data set visually mimic the bands of white calcite (indicating human activity) found in the sediment of a pond that was proposed last year as the site of the golden spike marking the beginning of the Anthropocene.⁵ The next sculpture, What time? (2024), featured an aluminum plaque that read, “What time is it in 10 million years?” and was labeled “meek respite,” as if relief from our climate anxieties may be found in projections of the far future. Timekeepers’ penultimate work, Cornspearacies (2024), included bottles of high fructose corn syrup and candles shaped like corn cobs, extensions of an agricultural motif the artist began employing when air samples from previous exhibitions came back showing high levels of ethanol.⁶ This altar stood on the floor beside Untitled (10:10:44), the final work in Stecklow’s progression of sculptural forms.

In its march through various objects, from fossil to clock, Timekeepers seemed to ask how we evolved into a state of efficiency-obsessed capitalism in which industrialization has narrowed our focus down to the minutiae of each second of an administered hour. This connection between time, capitalism, and ecological collapse harkens to the Climate Clock, an installation on the facade of a high-rise on the south end of New York City’s Union Square. Conceived by activists in 2020, this digital countdown displays the time left to curb CO₂ emissions before we risk levels of ecological endangerment deemed unacceptable per the 2016 Paris Agreement.⁷ Its massive orange numbers—which showed 5 years and 41 days at the time of this writing —remain relentlessly in motion, a self-evident spectacle that few stop to contemplate.

By contrast, Stecklow’s sculptures offer a polemic disguised as a riddle. By couching our abstract sense of time in specific yet obscure objects, Stecklow thwarts our tendency to skim for meaning, default to alarmism, and, paradoxically, return to business as usual. His sculptures slow down our reading, and in turn, offer an alternative to our usual narrative of environmental annihilation. Like anagrams, geological epochs are subject to further transformation. The future implicit in the question, “What time is it in 10 million years?” may still come to pass, though the answer will likely be in a form we haven’t yet imagined.

This review was originally published in Carla issue 37.

Jesse Stecklow, From Ear to Ear (installation view) (2024). Fossilized whale’s inner ear bones, bone conduction headset, paper, MDF, and sound, 13 x 18 x 3.25 inches. Image courtesy of the artist and Dracula’s Revenge, New York and Sweetwater, Berlin. Photo: Jason Mandella.

Jenny Wu is a critic, essayist, and the New York-based associate editor of ArtReview. Her work also appears in The New York Times, The Washington Post, e-flux, BOMB, and elsewhere. She teaches art writing in the visual arts program at Brooklyn College CUNY.

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