James Lewis




Living Stone
Solo exhibition, Pech, Vienna
28.11.24 - 11.01.25

Notes, transcripts, doodles: it is common to court these marginalia as minutes, as these pertain to the transcribed traces of our statistical experience. Implied is a lot of dead time, dead-ends, marked by clocking in and out, calling, tracing, marking, and re-marking, as it were. Themes of stagnation simmer in petri-dishes, which we are asked to watch like television: enlarged, scaled-up insignia of the real. Life becomes TV static swimming at the atomic scale inside of us.

‘Time’ comes up in my notes 237 times. 

Time, as in: statistical time, markers of time; phones going ring ring, phone numbers, calls with no caller ID, cut lines, power-outs, dial signals. I think about telephone-related movie tropes. But then there is time, also, that rings in alarm clocks, death knells, keypad sounds, ring tones. Trains and planes, arrivals and departures, flight paths, best laid plans, and lines of navigation. I get stuck on the notion of the lines of ‘tropic’ as a curious marker of time, and space, inverted across the globe.

Two idioms: 

Midnight is only dissimulated noon.

and

Night is the winter of the tropics.


I keep thinking about the tropics in winter, and dissimulated midnight, the night of the tropics, the everything that traverses the globe in latitudes and longitudes, measuring distances and sensations. 
That is, our attempt to capture, count, and measure everything—even the ruptures.
Impatient time trying to grasp the slowness of space. 

James adds to the list:

Masturbating: 6177600 seconds 
Watching TV: 289749600 seconds 
Cleaning: 46425600 seconds 
Driving: 136566000 seconds 
Sex: 10108800 seconds 
Working: 324000000 seconds 
Sleeping: 827859600 seconds 
Eating: 115552800 seconds
Showering: 43200000 seconds 
Toilet: 7948800 seconds


Extract from Kermit the Frog is the face of Omega, an essay by Sabrina Tarasoff, commissioned for Mucosa, p1-6, published by Nir Altman and Galerie Hubert Winter, 2023

Photos: kunst-dokumentation.com / Manuel Carreon Lopez



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