Excuse me, you’ve lost your watch. Or you will, at any rate, misplace any sense of clockish orientation once your feet carry you into that small space behind and beyond the triangular staircase where the first of a series of installations titled Intervals is located. Four separate pieces by the Mexican artist Julieta Aranda are arranged at varying distances from the faceless, generically-clothed figures staring back from the restroom doors. These works, though, are a far cry from any of Duchamp’s toilet savagery — instead, they examine relationships with time, an elusive resource that slips out of our hands like sand grains from an infant’s chubby fingers.

One of the four pieces, partially untitled (tell me if I am wrong) elaborates upon this startlingly strange path of time by setting up an hourglass, with sand falling up…and up again, aided by the movements of a rotating mechanism. First, however, one must find the little observation point- no, that hole in the slanted column is not for your finger. Rather, look closely and you’ll find that Aranda has employed that cobwebbed camera obscura technique to project an upside-down, sharp image onto a hollowed space. In recent times, the method famously used by Vermeer has been revived by other artists fiddling with optics, such as Abelardo Morell’s 1997 conversion of a Marriott hotel room into an area that reflected the bright lights of Times Square through a small eyelet in the window.

two shakes, a tick and a jiffy is a clock that greets the viewer with abrupt anti-patterns of movement — sometimes the hand moves in slow arcs, occasionally in fast swiveling motions, backwards and forwards according to the electrocardiography data reportedly lodged within its insides.

In this piece, Aranda has taken inspiration from the decimal time system of the French Revolution days that smashed the conventional chronology-organizing method, arranging the jagged edges into a calendar of weeks with ten days, with ten hours of 100 minutes (each consisting of a hundred decimal seconds). This over sized timepiece begs the viewer to reconsider standard measurements of the running seconds, whether the world is making some form of progress, rewinding or freezing up at a still like a video cassette with faulty tape. Nearby, saving it for later is a retro transistor radio that beeps at intermittent periods, with the title probably questioning the thrifty attitude that hoards useless antiques in suburban garages, leaving the discarded, outdated junk in heaps alongside beaded lampshades and torn flapper dresses.

Finally, on view throughout the whole length of the staircase is the phosphorescent paint of inscriptions about time, such as “so it goes”, “oh time thy pyramids” or “daylight is not kind to ghosts”, gleaned from 2000 years’ worth of quotations on the matter. When illuminated, the walls seem slightly stained by hues of palest lime, but at appointed instances the lights shut off and, in their place, the phrases suddenly glow on plaster, time on space. Perhaps, like the title of this particular piece, it is not necessary to resolve this — this exhibit, it appears, urges us to reconsider how we distribute our living moments and turn around to see the writing on the wall.