Employing everyday household items such as sowing string and a cheap tablecloth, the piece is an early installment in a theme that repeats in Goldstein’s work over the years: the portrayal of time and movement. First, the piece creates a sense of ongoing time thanks to its technique: the labor-intensive embroidery is shown from its underside, which reveals a messy trace of the work that went into it. The piece thus shows an exact moment of the captured runners but at the same time also the hours of work invested in making that image.
Second, the piece’s composition and “duration” hints at ongoing time and proposes methods for its notation. The image of the runners is taken from a photo-finish camera, which tracks runners during a race and capture split-second images of them as they move. As opposed to the original frozen frames, the piece’s surface is divided into rows and columns, which represent the runner’s tracks but also seem to be a time sequence. The red vertical lines imply a rhythm, or regular break in the timeline. The runners are drawn with thin embroidery lines, and it is unclear whether each fleeting, delicate figure represents a different runner (and the image one snapshot moment) or the same runner at different points in time (and thus the whole race, from beginning to end).
