Numbering Our Days: Time at the Movies
Ron Reed
September 16–October 3, 2026
PREVIEWING: September 8–15, 2026
OPENING RECEPTION: Wednesday, September 16, 4–8 pm
ARTIST TALK: Friday, October 2, 7–8:30 pm
Featuring a series of meticulously constructed video artworks, Ron Reed's Numbering Our Days: Time at the Movies is a playful but powerful meditation on how cinema shapes our sense of being in time. Assembled from thousands of clips from feature films, Ron's works reprocess the temporality of cinema through unexpected ordering principles—dates, times of day, an endless sequence of staircases, etc.—in ways that make conspicuous not only the medium of film but the time of the lives we're living.
Artist Statement
"[It is] the mission of art to rescue the world from transience and corruption, to capture moments and events in time and space before they slip into the irretrievable past, and so bear witness to the hand of God in creation." — Steven D. Greydanus on André Bazin
This video installation is the culmination of a project begun on June 6, 2004. It is an act of oblation that offers up the overwhelming multiplicity of human experiences in seven film montages, considering time and eternity through the lens of world cinema.
The twelve-hour Date Movie moves day by day through the twelve months of the year, offering up the array of human experience in more than 3,500 film clips. TimePiece compresses 24 hours of clock time into sixty minutes, a tribute to Christian Marclay's celebrated work The Clock (2010), while the Cinema Chapel contemplates our never-ending conversation with God as portrayed in movie prayers spoken and silent, whether devout, desperate, or profane.
Other works in this exhibition celebrate the movies themselves. Marquee presents a history of cinema through theatre marquees. Screens / Watchers Deconstruction watches people watching movies, dislocated from time and sequence. Studio Credits gives credit where credit is due, in chronological order. And the Endless Staircase offers a vertiginous moving picture of humans ascending and descending in an infinite cinematic pilgrimage.
For Dal Schindell and Loren Wilkinson