Artistic Statement & Description: “Difference is Repetition”

” Circularity of predetermined images, not thought, is the true beginning.” – ZT Tosha

Medium: Site-specific, two-channel black-and-white video installation (silent).

Location & Duration: Yale Observatory, Bethany, Connecticut (2021–2026). A durational project developed in situ.

Core Concept: An exploration of institutional, measured time against the phenomenological time of the observing body. Using the mechanics of the camera and the projector as parallel timekeeping devices, the work interrogates the genesis of predetermined images within the unique context of an astronomical observatory repurposed for artistic vision.

Detailed Description:

The installation is a durational meditation born from a five-year engagement with the historic Yale Observatory. It occupies a resonant space within the building, likely a former calculation room or a corridor marked by the passage of scholarly time.

Two large, opposing projections create a contemplative environment. On each screen, a series of stark, high-contrast black-and-white photographs are presented—documentary evidence of the artist’s repeated visits. The central subject in every frame is the artist, captured in a state of stilled observation. His gaze is fixed not on the celestial domes or telescopes, but on a utilitarian industrial clock mounted on the observatory wall—a symbol of segmented, quantified, terrestrial time that now governs a space once dedicated to cosmic scale.

The crucial mechanical action is a slow, continuous, and seamless horizontal rotation. The photographs pan from left to right in an infinite scroll. As one image completes its traversal and exits the frame, the next nearly identical one enters from the opposite side. The “difference” between each photograph—taken over months and years—is minute: a shift in the artist’s posture, a change in the fall of light through a window, the almost imperceptible crawl of the clock’s hands. This subtle variation, embedded in the repetitive structure, becomes the true subject, revealing time’s passage where a perfect loop would deny it.

Themes and Interpretation:

1. The Observatory as Co-Author & Palimpsest (2021-2026): The five-year timeline is intrinsic. The work is an archive of a body in dialogue with a specific architecture over time. It juxtaposes the building’s original purpose—mapping stellar and geological epochs—with the stark reality of its functional, industrial timepiece. The artist becomes a modern-day astronomer of the self, measuring the internal universe of perception against this institutional metric.

2. Cinema as a Clockwork Mechanism: The left-to-right rotation directly mimics the mechanical action of a film projector, a scanner, or even a seismograph. It makes the “frame” of the medium visible, suggesting our modes of seeing are themselves pre-mechanized. Within an observatory—a site of looking—this asks: what apparatus governs our sight?

3. Difference in Repetition: The title, evoking philosopher Gilles Deleuze, is performed literally. True repetition is impossible; the slight variations accrued over the project’s long duration are where meaning condenses. The “beginning of thought” happens in the gap between expectation and the noticed flicker of change—the strain in the act of watching, the tension between the archival photograph and the imposed, cinematic motion.

4. The Body as a Pendulum (2021-2026): The artist’s recurring figure acts as a human pendulum, a counter-weight to the industrial clock. This is not a performance captured once, but a ritual repeated and documented across years. His persistent presence asks: what time does a body in residence keep? Is it the cyclical time of ritual, or is it, too, being wound and set by the larger mechanisms of history and architecture?

Conclusion:

“Difference is Repetition” (2021–2026) is a meditative and rigorous site-specific archive. It transforms the Yale Observatory into a meta-observatory, where the subject of study is time itself, refracted through the lenses of architecture, durational performance, and the cinematic apparatus. It invites the viewer to step into the rhythm of its endless scroll, to lose and then find themselves in the subtle, accumulated gaps between images—gaps filled with five years of light, dust, and quiet observation.