this sun is made to tell time

this sun is made to tell time presents a tearaway calendar bound with dryer sheets. I first used a clothes dryer when I left home for college and kept the dryer sheets from my laundry for years. Every week, the machine replaces the sun to warm and refresh the clothes I wear; it keeps a time record of my body when I am in need of restoring my “habit” for everyday life. Each dryer sheet, meant for discard, indexes these moments of vulnerability; it reminds me of the sun back home, the clotheslines lining the city blocks, the whole landscape that makes our routines possible, now condensed into a machine and its ephemera.

Each dryer sheet bears a coin motif, evoking the joss paper which we burned to honor and provide for our dead in Vietnam. Also an ephemeral artifact, joss paper keeps a distinct sense of time - time of festivals and anniversaries, and also of fire and ash - that bridges life and death. Like the dryer, the furnace goes through cycles of heat, transformation, and dispersal to provide for loved ones in both the physical and spiritual realms. The makeshift calendar gathers the transient means of communing with our bodies and those absent, the continual dissolution that anchors me home.