Time is both an essential form of measurement that rules our day-to-day lives and a concept that no one quite understands. From the ultrafast zeptosecond to the billions of years that the universe has been in existence, we can easily measure time’s passage. Yet some scientists question whether it is even fundamentally real.

While the concept of time can feel impossible to capture, that hasn’t stopped artist Lia Halloran from trying. Many of her projects tackle how scale and time shift our perception of reality. In her 2022 piece Double Horizon, a 3-channel video installation piece, she projected divergent but closely related images of Los Angeles from a series of repeated flights she made over the city as she learned to fly. In her 2008 work Dark Skate, she skateboarded at night through different venues in Los Angeles, using light to draw an ephemeral line through a series of photographs.

This fall, Halloran has two new exhibits that are part of an expansiveOne of those exhibits is a series of oil paintings called , which attempts to examine how machines and tools might symbolize the natural passage of time. Another is , a single work that combines painting and cyanotype—a print made by exposing a UV-sensitive chemical-coated paper to sunlight—to visualize eight layers of scale, from her own growing children to gravitational waves to vacuum fluctuations at the moment of the Big Bang.  I spoke with Halloran about using time as a tool to make art and what inspires her.