The Time Machine
This diptych reframes time travel as a consumer ritual, transforming nostalgia into a site of absurd metamorphosis. The Time Machine uses humor and visual contrast to question the cost of longing for the past in a culture of mass-produced memory.
In the photographic diptych The Time Machine, the artist subverts the myth of technological time travel by juxtaposing a chrome gumball dispenser with a grotesque, cloth-draped skull. This pairing transforms a familiar symbol of childhood pleasure into a cautionary tale about nostalgia, memory, and the absurdity of longing for escape from the present. Executed with a polished sense of formal balance and comic timing, the work trades in the visual language of Americana, retro consumerism, and macabre humor.
The composition is divided into two vertically stacked Polaroid-style frames. The lower frame features the tight, cropped view of a vintage gumball machine, its chrome latch gleaming against a patterned gold metal backdrop. The reflections on its worn surface speak to repeated use, invoking a shared history of minor indulgences. Yet here, the familiar becomes strange. Decontextualized and presented without the colorful candy it would normally dispense, the mechanism takes on the appearance of a portal—or more accurately, a trigger.
Crucially, the gumball machine introduces the concept of chance. Part of its childhood appeal lies in randomness: insert a coin, twist the knob, and await the surprise. That unpredictability becomes menacing here. The viewer is reminded that not all outcomes are desirable, and what once promised innocent delight now delivers a disturbing transformation.
Above the machine, the upper frame reveals the result of that transaction: a wide-eyed skull, draped in fraying burlap, grins out at the viewer with manic intensity. Its exaggerated features—bulging plastic eyes, exposed teeth, and crudely wrapped face—sit somewhere between prop comedy and horror. Rather than transporting the traveler across time, the machine has reassembled the subject into a caricature of their former self. The punchline lands quickly, but its implications are slow to fade.
The Time Machine draws strength from this tension between comic absurdity and existential dread. Its humor is accessible and immediate, yet it delivers a deeper critique of how nostalgia operates in contemporary life. The gumball machine, once a dispenser of joy, now represents the seductive simplicity of curated memory—packaged, sold, and consumed with no guarantee of satisfaction. The element of risk elevates the critique: this is not merely about buying back the past, but gambling on it.
Color plays a subtle but crucial role in this transformation. The greenish cast that suffuses both frames introduces an unnatural tone, draining warmth from the imagery and binding the two halves in a single chromatic atmosphere. This visual linkage reinforces the idea of a closed system: an input and an output, both contaminated by the same toxic glow of desire.
Texture further enhances the conceptual layering. The machine’s metallic rigidity contrasts with the organic looseness of the burlap, underscoring the dissonance between sleek surfaces of consumption and the entropy they mask. These choices render the diptych a kind of consumer feedback loop—one where the act of nostalgic yearning mutates the subject, rather than delivering them to safety.
In broader cultural terms, the work speaks to the commodification of the past in the digital age—where vintage aesthetics, reboots, and filtered memories are currency. Time is not traveled here; it is bought, randomized, and ultimately warped. The figure that returns from the machine is not a visitor from another era, but a relic remade for ours.
By visually collapsing consumer object, subject, and outcome, The Time Machine enacts a critique that is both playful and pointed. It exposes the ease with which culture packages the past as an accessible thrill, while quietly reminding us that what we recover may not resemble what we lost—and that every nostalgic investment carries a degree of uncertainty.
In the end, the machine offers no real transportation—only transformation, mediated by chance. The viewer is left with the uneasy sense that the next time they insert a coin into the mechanisms of memory, they may not get what they bargained for.
Essay written: May 2025