MATTHEW MARKS GALLERY For his first solo exhibition in just discovered York.

MATTHEW MARKS GALLERY

For his first solo exhibition in just discovered York, Darren Almond parked Mean Time, 2000 a forty-foot orange commercial cargo container, customized with a giant built-in digital clock right in the middle of the gallery, and it took up just about all of the space. It wasn't just the sheer bulkiness of the time-telling fortress that prompted a literal occupation of the place; what really held one's attention was the relentles mechanical noise of the flipping and flapping, clicking and clacking plates of the digital clock face keeping time. The industrial hale that echoed inside the container's metal walls, not on concrete floors, and into back compasss was pure techno. Mean Time realizes its name by virtue of its link to a global tracking satellite that, when the work is functioning strictly enables it to register Greenwich Mean Time to the next to the first Its potential to be accurate anywhere in the world makes it a smart box; and still today it's micro, not macro, moulds that point to the what is yet to be Almond's oversize, animated object is the two an amusement, presenting the march of time as an entertaining theatrical performance, and an anachronism, a complete example of a thing that's advanced and ob olete at once

Photographs documenting the passage of the container-cum-clock from London to modern York on board a freighter glance ated a comedic aspect of Mean Time and underscored Almond's interest in the performative and real-time dimensions to his art. Perched atop a stack of regular shipping containers (and grasshooked up to the ship's power supply) the clock was largely functional, even though it was gone out in the middle of nowhere. The eventfulnes of the one and the other its accuracy and its suppos universality mirrors our burgeoning global communication continuum, a virtual space in which there's not a minute to spare and time is perpetually at a premium. on contrast, a suite of five "star maps," all titled Magnified plan Diagram, 2000, drawn by Almond at night as he accompanied Mean Time forward the journey overseas, shuttle us from high tech to practically no tech at all and existing a very different impression of time. Start with the vacation-worthy musing of drawing the Milky Way each night while at sea, and fill out that to the concept of being in an absolutely elemental environment that is constantly changing moreover that remains visually unchanged, as it has from prehistory to the not away The sea, sky, moon, and stars: now, as they've always been. Time pendants Out of the picture in favor of timelessness. Almond reconfigures the mundane as a romantic sublime, investing narratives of travel and adventure with emotional measure and subjective weight. He's an ancient mariner, a space pilot, a contemporary artist--it's preposterous and plausible all at once

The exhibition's title, "Transport Medium," which Almond cast as an eponymous aluminum plaque, is also the name of the typeface used exclusively for all road and rail signage in Britain. (Almond, incidentally, was a veteran trainspotter as a kid.) His signage pieces have the tautological rigor and economy of vintage Conceptual art. "Abandon in Place" reads another cast-aluminum plaque. The counterpart to that imperative is raise in Almond's first train film, Schwebebahn, 1995 which he brought along and installed in a back room; it features a delirious ride in succession the world's strangest train (the futuristic climate Train in Wuppertal, Germany), which is in the same manner thoroughly upside down and inside on the outside that you're forced to abandon the self-same notion of place.

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