Can you tell us a little about your art and your background? What is more important for art, the idea or the execution?

I am an intermedia artist who works a lot with sound, music, video, and installation. The subjects surrounding my work often deals with themes of the Everyday- those things we encounter regularly and take for granted, but it also considers the ways that the things we cannot see impact our lives, both real and imagined from a mythopoetic lens. My music/sonic work is often described as focused, noisy, and meditative. A strange combination, but it works.

I started playing instruments as a child, and started doing photography in my early teens. My education is more sound/music focused, though I have trained in dance, film/video, and painting. My favorite thing to is perform, and I love to combine improvisation with music/sound and physical movement.

 

What subject matters interest you? What are the stories behind your latest projects?

I’m interested in how Everyday life and objects impact us. I find myself drawn to how infrastructure plays a part in telling us how to live, where to go, and what to do. In some ways, this is a nonsense statement, because you can kind of boil everything down into some level of mundane influence, but it’s still there, percolating in our senses. That point where the visible becomes invisible, or when the invisible starts to become infrastructural, that’s where it is super interesting and exciting for me. I am also very interested in resistance, and how we resist the power structures that control our daily life.

In my most recent projects, I’ve returned to an earlier object of interest, the streetlight. These are super fascinating! They tell us so much about places. From the color of the light to the placement, we learn so much. They are a socio-economic marker that is really unparalleled, telling us about the financial stability of neighborhoods and cities. They tell people when to go home, where it’s safe to be… they are fascinating. Of course, we see them in all sorts of media, especially film. They have this subconscious pressure on us that we can’t ignore them, but at the same time, they are not something we actively pay attention to on a daily basis.

In two of my more recent video pieces, the installation Witnesses (2020) and my performance work/composition Stop. Reflect. Redirect. (2021), are composed of videos of streetlights turning on at sunset near locations where the murdered bodies of trans people of color were found in Detroit, Michigan, USA. I started this project in 2020 after the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor at the hands of police in the United States during the height of the Black Lives Matters protests. When I started to really delve into the histories of police brutality in Michigan, I found myself stunned at how many trans people of color, especially Black trans women, who have been murdered in Detroit. I could not look away, and I really wanted to bring light to the reality that so many have lived and experience daily. So these works grow out of questions I have around the belief we hold that visibility will keep us safe. As a society, we seem to think that being visible, or having videos taken while something bad is happening, will deter something bad from happening. What I am asking in these two projects is for us to really ask who, or what, we are actually protecting with visibility and light? What good is visibility if we are not using it to protect and help our most vulnerable?

I also am working on a series of pieces that I am loosely calling The Menagerie. The Menagerie began with an installation piece called The Wishing Goat that questions the role of confession, prayer, wishing, and the use of ‘public magic’ as a form of influence in political establishments.  The Wishing Goat is an sound installation for 8-channel speaker array and goat skull microphone. Participants are invited to go into a small room with the skull microphone to make wishes on the skull. Their wishes are then processed electronically to modify them, and then spatialized in the surrounding 8 speakers. The piece premiered at Talbertronics, a festival at Oberlin College in spring of 2017, along with the closing performance using the goat microphone and the recorded wishes in the performance Bone Piece. I am currently expanding the goat skull instrument by imbedding a small camera into its eye socket, so that I can use it for gesture and object recognition in performance. These works have initiated a series of pieces that incorporate music, immersive video that incorporates dance for camera, multi-channel installation sound art, sound sculpture, and painting. I am currently working to find a curator to help me program these pieces in a gallery setting.

Where does the process begin for you? Do you create the sound first or do you think about the instruments and performance?

The process for me always begins with a question. These can start out very simple: what is an object that influences us, or influences a kind of behavior in us? I almost always start with some kind of concept to explore.

Then I have to figure out the object or idea. What is it? How is it used or how does it impact people/the environment/the world? What symbolic weight does it have? Does it have any myths stories surrounding it? What does the object mean? Once I know this, I can ask my next question: What is the best media for this object to be represented by? This is important. Though I mostly work with sound, people often find sounds and music hard to understand conceptually, especially if there are no words to tell us how we are to interpret them. This is where video and physical objects come into my work. If I started with an object in my first exploration, then I need to figure out what sounds the object makes on its own and need to figure out how to share that with others. If it is already a sound making object, or if this is something best explored in music, then I need to figure out what the visual supports need to be. This is where I start to branch out- either sculpture, site specificity, or media specificity become very important. I guess, that’s it: media specificity is super important.

Where does sound come into this? It’s always there. For lack of a better term, sound is a priori in my work. I don’t think about it, until I need to design with/around it. But it’s there. When it comes to sound, I think about it as a site specific thing. I use it based on the object and site of production. It is a building material, both architecturally and physically. There isn’t anything where sound in not in play (even when the is silence, I am thinking about it). The way I perform it, present it, or compose with it is all structured around various material notions of it. Sound is a very physical medium for me.

How do you feel working with students? 

I love working with students! It is such a part of my practice. I like teaching, and I really enjoy watching students ‘get it’. I teach at a university, where I teach courses in electronic music composition and film studies classes. My favorite teaching moments are when I am teaching foundation classes to people who do not want to work in digital media (which is basically all I teach). Why do I like that? Because there is something really neat about getting a chance to expand how someone is thinking about art. That moment when they wake up to a new place in art practice is so beautiful.

To what extent has your everyday life as an artist changed during pandemics?

When the pandemic started in 2020, I really took advantage of lockdown to create. I didn’t necessarily make great work, but I made new work every day for much of the first six months after lockdown started where I was. As it has stretched out, however, my work has changed— but also has not changed. What do I mean by this? I found it incredibly hard to create in 2021. I was not able to make connections to set up shows, and so my public performance life slowed down. I say slowed because I have things planned, but they are all amorphous and built around that ‘one day’ when it makes sense to travel and gather people together. So, I have many things on pause. I look back at the projects that I had started and did not finish, and I feel such a weird combination of awe and disconnection. The phrase “Wait, I made this?” comes out from time to time. Or rather, it did, because I did not make much from August 2021-December 2021. But then in early January I was sick, and something about that changed my attitude. I went back to these unfinished projects and then just started finishing them. It has been great- because I am finding myself at the end of this creative slump with a ton of work that just needs minute amounts of work done on them to then finish them. It was like I somehow past me found a way to set me up after my internal crisis was over to be amazing.

Once these things are done though, I am not sure what is next. I’m not who I was two years ago when this started. I may have different interests now, and I will have to see what that means.

 

How do you feel about being involved in an online residency program? How important is it to stay connected with the international art community?

I am quite excited about being involved in an online residency program. This is my first time participating in one, and it has been a fantastic experience. Being able to connect with people from throughout the world is so important as an artist, and the ability to do so virtually during such complicated times is such a positive experience. I always enjoy meeting artists from other countries, and it is important to keep myself grounded in my own practice to see how it relates to the work of others, and can share the art I’m learning about with my students, colleagues, and friends in real time. It is really great.

 

What are your thoughts about the theme ‘artist on standby’? Tell us a bit more about your project…You will be using different sounds….

When I came to the residency, I think that the meaning for ‘artist on standby’ meant something else. I really resonated with it from the perspective of time- of extra time, of waiting, of gestation. I have to admit though that the immediate change in the political climate since I applied has really impacted my thinking on this. This moment of standby. What does that mean? When does stand by end? When do we turn standby into something else, something more? More and more, I am wondering if this feeling of suspended animation that I have been living with for the past few years is changing. I see that much of my suspended state of being is one that is more about perspective shift than one of stopping. I suppose that for me, stand by is becoming a moment of pivot, of redirection.

The project that I am working with, or hoping to work with, is a collaborative project where I collect sounds and objects from the artists I am in residency with and then create a performance/installation work that will use these sounds to create a sound piece. Originally, I was thinking about weaving together mundane sounds into an interactive piece. I am not sure what sounds I will get, so in some respects the outcome of this sound work will be indeterminate. I am okay with that instability. This work will shift and change though. I don’t want to be too attached on a specific outcome for it, because I do not even know what sound materials or objects I am working with. But I am also working on a few other things as well. I will be presenting a few improvisation sessions with musicians where I am, and we will use the prompt “artist on standby” to inform our performances.

 

What do you want to achieve before things return to normal?

I am not sure! I think that for me, the things I want to achieve right now are immediate and very personal even though they will impact my art. I feel less anchored as an artist at the moment. So, I suppose my hope is that I feel a directional  pull.  Something is happening in me, I am just not sure what that is yet.

Any future plans/projects?

I am working on a few short dance for camera films at the moment, and will be releasing an album later this year. I am also in the process of finding a gallery for a body of work that I started before the pandemic that focuses on myths surrounding witchcraft and animism. The work combines paintings, video, dance/performance, and sound installation.