Location + Time Drawings (2007 Season)

This series consists of 153 pairs of drawings, along with 30 separate unpaired drawings, from the 2007 baseball season. The paired drawings are the same inning of a game drawn from a space as well as a time perspective. The drawings on graph paper plot the time of the game. The drawings on plain paper plot the location of pitches within the strike zone. The single drawings are unpaired due to assorted logistical difficulties on my end.

The drawings on graph paper address the temporal aspects of the game, that is, how time is perceived or experienced by someone watching or listening to a game. For a long time I had been trying to determine how to represent the time, the duration, of a baseball game when you’re listening to it on the radio. These drawings document the time that passes between events by estimating time (marking seconds elapsed by drawing dashes in the squares of graph paper, not timing the events with a stopwatch) in order to depict how long an inning appears to be. I’ve plotted when pitches occur and what if anything happens. The 2007 drawings are best seen in pairs, the space/location drawings side by side with the time drawings.

The drawings in this series grew out of the drawings of the 2006 season. After completing the 2006 series, the question was, what next? Would it be possible to do more than document the space of events? I’ve always been interested in finding non-literal ways of depicting time in my work, often through foregrounding the process of making the work. The graph paper drawings in this series are the result of plotting the perceived time of events instead of the space of events.

One unexpected result of this dual plotting system occurs when two drawings of the same inning are placed next to each other. In many instances, the tangle of lines connecting the events in the games mirrors the shapes formed by its pair, even though the plotting systems differ. I don’t know why this happens.