befriending spectres

My installation/happening took place last night, March 5, from 10pm-midnight in Harper Hall. I created three sculptural lantern scores out of sticks, colorful tissue paper, and torn-up fragments of the score to Songs Without Words ; created three graphic scores made by layering tissue paper and glow in the dark mod podge on torn-out pages of Songs Without Words ; composed an ambient electronic track that underscored the duration of the happening; and brought the rest of Songs Without Words for participants to tear up as part of the happening. I kept the lights very dim - almost off - so that the lanterns, and the lights placed inside the piano, would be visible. I also brought some materials for piano extended techniques - superball mallets and fishing line - so people could experiment with unusual means of sound production.  My goals were to create an otherworldly space for people to experiment with sound and movement through the use of lighting, sound, and sculptural elements, in ord

Rebecca Carlton discussed two intertwined ideas that I enjoy thinking about: an artist's memory stores, from which personal symbols emerge in their work; and our memory stores as a species, from which globally intelligible symbols emerge. Carlton described using these global symbols intentionally, so that people are welcomed, drawn in aesthetically, and then from that commonly intelligible jumping off point her work can bring the audience into deeper questions about the issues important to her: social and environmental justice. Some symbols she mentioned include trees, leaves, eggs, containers and baskets, items that exist on nearly every continent and in every human community.  I appreciated the opportunity she gave the audience to go back into our own memories and find sensory experiences that have influenced us since, and the subsequent questions she posed - what is the intention of your work? What do you want the viewer to receive about you as an artist? And her statement - aes

Louise Bourgeois considered herself an existentialist. She studied math and philosophy, particularly Descartes and Pascal, at the Sorbonne, described herself as a “Daughter of Voltaire,” and defined herself in opposition to Camus.    In an August 1991 diary entry, she wrote, “Sisyphus liked pushing his rock up. It was his reason for life. A form of self-expression that taught him nothing. Camus didn’t want to learn. He wanted to justify his suffering. I want to learn.” Art historian Saul Nelson continued, “Bourgeois, on the other hand, wanted to be a Sisyphus who learns, whose repetitive action not only reveals the surface condition of mortal existence but penetrates its being” (490). Bourgeois was obsessive about her work, or rather, she plumbed the depths of her chosen imagery - eyes, the color red, hands, the human form, spiders, reflections, circles and spheres. In Rebecca Carlton’s artist talk on Monday, she talked about using universal symbols that all humans recognize and can r

I've completely changed my project idea! Now, I'm planning to make a bunch of lanterns out of foraged materials (twigs and branches) and either sheet music (from ancient falling-apart books) or newspapers. So far, sheet music has been a little challenging to work with because it's pretty thick and resists being molded into shapes, but I would really prefer to stick with sheet music as opposed to newspaper if possible because I love the idea of cutting, ripping, destroying, reimagining the sheet music that is so sacred to classical performers. In classical music, the composer's will is treated as absolute - the performer is expected to follow every expressive marking to the letter, it's unheard of to add or remove notes. The conventions of musical practice, at least in the piano department here, place all the importance on the composer's vision and give the pianist little autonomy to say anything new through playing the notes on the page. Even though I've bar

All of the projects I'm working on right now, be they performance, composition, or dance, have to do in one way or another with internal immensity (the vastness of emotional experience, the wilds of mental illness, the mystery of dreams, the worlds hidden away within our skulls, the possibilities opened up by loss and grief and death).  I've had a vision for a music performance installation for about six months: my original idea was to build a huge cube out of PVC pipe and drape all the sides with gauzy gray fabric, and put four musicians inside, playing a minimalist electroacoustic piece. The gauze-covered cube idea is meant to represent the veil between the living and the dead - the audience can see the shapes of the musicians through the fabric, but they aren't invited inside, can't participate in it - it's important for them to interact with the cube (the dead), but they have no way of gaining access to the inside of the cube (the otherworld, land of the dead, w

The main idea I was playing with for this project was accidentally inspired by an Instagram video series by Alarm Will Sound, entitled "Will It Bow?", in which their musicians take a bow to objects that usually are not bowed and see what kind of sounds those objects make, if any. My fledgling concept is entitled "Will It Shelf?", in their honor.  At the moment, I have 10 of the library's 12 Rachmaninoff biographies sitting in my bedroom for my Russian capstone. Many of these volumes are quite old and bound in colorful, if faded, fabric. I took these (and some other objects you'll see momentarily) down to the basement, my new favorite place, not yet knowing what I'd do with them. I actually started off with other objects - earrings, glass, beaded bracelets - moving to the books later.  First, my killer rabbit earring went for a ride in an old glass goblet I found at a thrift store.  Then, killer rabbit earring fulfilled its earring function and hung place

I grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area, so it was fun to see my home framed through Kayla Bauer's art. Even though I've lived there for over two decades, I found that her photos reflected a really intentional being-with the city that I've never thought to practice, walking ten to twelve miles of its streets by herself each day, celebrating the dailiness that's so easy to glaze over and take for granted.  Take the photo above, for example: the peach and lilac color blocking is brightened by the darker green hair on the sign, and the whole left side of the image balances the dark alleyway through the gate. It's a gorgeous accident that she found in the wild and documented, but how many people walk past this composition each day without really seeing it? What would it be like if people went through the world seeing art everywhere they went?