Artist Statement

My work explores the interplay between music notation and performer. Through recontextualizing the notion of a music score as conceptual art, I blend together elements of traditionally notated scores, text-based scores, and illuminated manuscripts, situating the participant in a space of their own curiosity and creativity. Within my artistic process I use everyday technologies (cellphones, combs, fans) as a foundation for active listening. My goal is creating a performance that resonates with the listener’s curiosity.

In my piece Episode 8, the process of chopping, art making, eating, and celebrating are recontextualized as sonic processes. While the sonic properties of these objects have always been present, the piece gives them presence within the listener’s world. Perhaps when an audience member returns home, they will decide to play with their own household objects actively listening to the object’s sonic properties. Beyond the audience, my compositional work also urges performers to play and refocus their embodied listening. I form my music around the concepts of embodied listening. In An Anatomical Study on Escape, the practitioners inhale together and perform timed actions within each others exhalations. Time becomes encoded in the breathing body as a sonic action. The encoding of an ensemble of breathing bodies directly into the score allows for the ensemble listening process to generate the audible soundscape. My work highlights an awareness of what it means to perform in a sonic ensemble.

As a performer, my main instrument is amplified electric fan. I use contact microphones to amplify the heartbeat of the electric fan's motor. The fan’s heartbeat is sound that is dulled away by our ears because of its extraneous nature to the fan’s purpose—providing air circulation. When I perform on a fan, the audience is reminded that the fan produces an oscillating sonic signature and is a sonically significant object within any spacd. Within the performance, the fan gains a presence, a voice, and becomes a living object. The fan also gains layer of anthropomorphized vocality that reverberates through our listening. After the performances, audience members have often remarked on how the room (especially in spaces with loud air conditioners or heaters) provided a cohesive and meditative experience within the piece, rather than a factor that reduced their ability to focus on ‘the music.’ I see my work with amplified electric fans as a pathway towards listening complexly to the objects in our own private spaces. If a person can go home and notice the hum of the electric objects in their own space, then my piece was successful in bringing them closer to my own listening experience.