The Emergent Clock – Time & Labor is a series of nine platinum palladium photographic prints that delves into time, space, the unseen, and the figure of the bell in the landscapes of plantations in the rural U.S. South—referred to as “time consciousness,” plantation capitalism was based on chattel slave labor. This non-wage economic system did not consider time or space but only the rhythm of each day from "can't see to can't see," which was before sunrise and after sunset and an enslaved person’s life from birth to death.
Southern enslavers' unique acceptance of modernity in the 1830s transitioned the plantation economic system to the concept of clocks and watches as a new way to measure time and, in turn, to instill a similar consciousness in the enslaved. Most antebellum plantocracies not only depended on torture, mutilation, imprisonment, and being sold away from their families, but also the clock and bells to communicate with the enslaved; the more significant the size and quantity of the bell, the larger the plantocracy.
