by David Wilikofsky
Jill Whit, like many of us, spent much of 2020 alone. The Salt Lake City based multidisciplinary artist works across many mediums (in addition to being a recording artist, she works in fine art mediums and as a tattoo artist), and her latest project, time is being, incorporates many of those talents to paint a portrait of her year. Written, recorded and self-produced over long days in quarantine, the end result is intimate and beautiful, a diaristic window into Whit’s life in 2020.
As an album, time is being is filled with songs reflecting the new realities we were all grappling with in 2020. Whit largely forgoes the guitar-centric palette of her previous recordings and instead builds shimmering soundscapes with warm washes of synth. The open ended expanse of these sounds mirror the liminality of quarantine, seemingly stretching out infinitely without clear beginnings or ends. Against this backdrop Whit ponders the monotony of quarantine living, expresses generosity and patience towards herself, and explores what it means to be alone with yourself. These are songs that feel content to just exist, observing without ever casting judgement.
The album is accompanied by a zine filled with paintings, drawings, photos, and lyrics, all made during the past year. We see the pictures of her dogs referenced in “Waking From A Dream”. We see two hands holding each other, bringing to mind the line “your touch is like a symbol / The language of light / A token of what is real” from “Internet Cowboy”. We see images of Whit recording the album in her bedroom and others where she is framed by vast landscapes. You start to get a fuller picture of what quarantine was for Whit; the zine gives visual form to the thoughts and experiences in Whit’s songs, and the songs create the psychic landscape in which these images live.
time is being is a project greater than the sum of its parts. It’s really not a set of songs or a zine, it’s an intimate portrait of Jill Whit that also manages to speak to the collective experience we’ve all had. It’s rare that an artist can take something personal and make it feel so universal. Whit has done it here.