Jan Stohl's Millenium Clock
At Cenrtre d'Art Port Royal, Montreal, 1451 Sherbrooke West
With The Twelve Who Turn Around and The Others, Canadian sculptor of Slovak origin Jan Stohl proposes a reunion of twelve characters, ancient and contemporary, at the turn of this century. Stohl builds his concept on the principle of the so called orloj, a type of medieval clock in which different sculpted characters which appear and disappear animated by a rotating mechanism. In this manner, they mark at each hour the passage of time.
The installation consists of twelve main characters of different sizes, placed on turning pedestals. The body is sculpted in granite or marble, decorated with stained glass and acrylics. The head, which is cast in bronze and treated like a masque, distinguishes itself from the body. Each character reveals a particular archetype: an idol, a Neanderthal man, a soldier, a schizophrenic, an angelic creature, a religious being... This panoply of characters does not aim to be exhaustive. The characters can be chosen randomly from the everyday or from some other time period, and they meet in a disparate mass of people.
At the turn of the new millenium, Jan Stohl creates a poetic world which explores the time past and reclaimed. The ensemble embodies the humans voyage through time and space. From this the artist draws the importance of the number twelve for the characters which indicates the twelve months of the year an the twelve hours of the clock. This artistic approach integrates time into the artwork by endowing it with a human physiognomy. At the same time, the artist represents in stone a transcendental vision of time and humanity.
Rossitza Daskalova