“Use your words”

When I am trying to bring a piece to completion, I find that I am trying to reach a place where the words fall away. Words are always hanging around, and are part of the process, can be there at the beginning. Some of the words that have lingered while I worked the last weeks: doorbell funk, bass pace, pipe to space, -----------, -----------, ----- -----, ---------------, ---------, --- -------, ----------, ----------------------, ------, ---------.

When I was invited to do something for the entrance to the gallery I became most interested in the shape of the passage. It’s a space where the flow from front to back are evident. I started to become interested in this movement in relation to sound and decided to use the hallway to work like I would in my studio. It is clear to me that the process of recording sound is as important to me as what it is I am recording. Doing the recording while making sound myself requires listening back to what I record later and this becomes an integral part of the piece and the process. I can’t usually make a sound and simultaneously listen to the way it sounds in a particular place. I thought to set up the piece Lateral in a way that allows me to make sound and get up from my chair and move to various spots where what I hear is influenced by the space and is different than what is heard from the point at the sound’s origin. One of the first things that became apparent and that several people mentioned when I first visited the gallery was that it isn’t the best place for audio. Most places aren’t. These types of factors are usually more interesting and something I end up focusing on anyway. The sound I’m interested in here is created with the space rather than being something that I am trying to reproduce in general places. A particularity that gets me hearing things and realizing what it is that might be creating difference.

What is perhaps not so evident is the flow through the hallway from back to front. But this movement, even if usually involving leaving, is just as important. I sometimes try to think about the steps I am taking in relation to a rhythm. At the same time I try to bring together the notion of my breathing and rhythm and then to link the two together, however precariously. Walking, breathing, and time. I am not sure I am ever successful in doing this, but this is one thing I was using to create the piece, wondering about how I might influence the movement up and down the hallway and the way that coming and going is experienced. Myself, I lingered in the gallery, making the piece, which included setting it up and listening to the things I couldn’t hear while I was recording the sound, walking around and back and forth and stopping in certain places, using memory to relate the experiences back to one another.

“It’s always time”

I’m not exactly sure at the moment when the photographs comprising what I’ll consider a drawing, Up Front, were made. I’d say around 2005. I do remember that I had just gotten a pocket digital camera and was playing around with that. I had become preoccupied with the idea of “Gesichtsraum”, which depending on who you’re talking to can come to include more or less of the practical and/or conceptual space in front of one’s face. I had taken a number of photos in the space along a street between several buildings and was fascinated by how slight changes in perspective can open and close more or less of the room surrounding a thing and change that shape. I collected the cut out shapes from each of the several photos I made at a particular crossing and stacked them on top of each other, trying to find a way to see the resulting composite space. I liked the way what appeared was something I considered to be a kind of face. I thought of this as a drawing for a sculpture. I wonder about what kind of flesh I can stretch around the skeleton to make a body out of the line drawing, what kind of material might make this space solid and come to life in front of me.