RACHEL ROSE: SONIC HEDGEHOG OPENS TODAY (MONDAY, OCTOBER 7TH, 7 - 9PM) @ MALRAUX'S PLACE

When I was ordering clocks online for this project, I got to know the way clocks are categorized - by face shapes and types of hands. This is the first time I’ve worked physically in a while, and I feel nervous about it. I’m nervous because the truth is it’s arbitrary how I’ve configured these clocks - a slight change in the way a shape connects to another, or a delay in the time I spend on one part and the entire mini-system on the clock face is reconfigured. I had to keep reminding myself that there’s no rush, because the clock itself is just a drawing, I’m adding animation to animation.

Sonic hedgehog (Shh) is a gene pathway named after the Sega Genesis character, Sonic the Hedgehog. It's active in the development of our facial features and limbs. Suffused with the name of a cartoon that embodies time, the sonic hedgehog develops its gene pathway as a matter of impulse, it’s at ease in spontaneously animating (creating) our faces.

I like the idea of a gene as a secret animation, and in all of the clocks for this project, I’ve used that to flatten exclamations, artificial light, and bodies into lines, stills and cuts.

In one clock I took stills from the early Disney film Gulliver’s Travels (1939) where an ensemble of very small people run curiously to a clock that’s twice their size. It’s the fallen pocket-watch of the ‘giant’ (to them) Gulliver. I printed it on transparency, and over that, printed an image of Sonic the Hedgehog. That day (yesterday), while I was waiting for the images to print I came across a photo of Kim wearing a latex skin-colored skirt. It looks like how it would feel to wrap a piece of the printing transparency paper around limbs, so I pasted it with other stills onto the clock.  

Kim is my favorite animation. Everyday I get one image, then the next, accumulating into entire movements, like having a baby or going to Paris. Her sonic hedgehog legs move slow in my time - slow like an early Disney animation where you see the colors and shapes impersonating forms. Clocks do this too, animating information about time, while impersonating our bodies.

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