Two Minutes and Twenty Seconds

20 Seconds of 2 Mins 20 Sec Eclipse #1

Eclipse Painting Project

Two Minutes and Twenty Seconds is an ongoing painting and sound installation inspired by the total solar eclipse of August 21, 2017.

In 2017, the Optics Division of the Metabolic Studio traveled to Wyoming to document the eclipse using a custom-built large-format camera loaded with mural-scale photographic paper. The project produced a continuous photographic record of the event, along with sound recordings, video documentation, and a handmade camera that functioned equally as scientific instrument and sculpture.

Yet despite participating in the act of recording the eclipse, I left with the feeling that I had not fully witnessed it.
 

Years later, the eclipse returned through memory and dreams. What resurfaced was not a scientific image, but a series of sensory impressions: shifting fields of color, animated flashes of light, spectral forms, and moments of visual instability that seemed to hover between perception and imagination. These recollections became the foundation for a new body of work exploring how extraordinary experiences are remembered, transformed, and reinterpreted over time.

The core of the project consists of eight paintings, each representing a twenty-second interval within the two minutes and twenty seconds of totality. Created in collaboration with performance artist and vocalist Carmina Escobar, the paintings are accompanied by corresponding twenty-second sound compositions derived from voice, memory, and imagined sonic landscapes. Together, image and sound form a sequence of experiential fragments rather than a documentary record.

Escobar's likeness appears throughout the paintings as both subject and celestial body. Her face serves simultaneously as sun and moon, creating a darkened eclipse form from which features slowly emerge: eyes, nose ring, smile, and a halo-like constellation of beads surrounding her head. Around this central void unfolds a field of luminous activity—shifting blues, violets, spectral lights, and fleeting forms that attempt to visualize the perceptual intensity of totality itself.

The completed installation will present the paintings within a darkened environment, each paired with its own soundscape, inviting viewers to move through the eclipse as a sequence of embodied moments. A second gallery space will include supporting paintings, historical eclipse imagery, archival material, and documentation of the original 2017 photographic expedition.

Part meditation on perception, part collaborative portrait, and part reimagining of a celestial event, Two Minutes and Twenty Seconds considers how memory evolves through time, how experiences become stories, and how the act of witnessing is always shared.