Writing

Artist Statement

Written April 30, 2023
Revised August 8, 2024

An Artist Statement... …An ever-changing document, forever in flux
A collection of thoughts in a given moment

I am an interdisciplinary stage and sound artist who creates work which exists along a continuum between musical composition and contemporary performance. I have a deep-seated belief that all art making is a political act and I strive to make work that considers socio-politics in an active capacity.

How aware are we that we engage with politics through our work, even in the simplest of contexts?
How do we go about addressing that engagement?
My personal political ideology lies on the far left and my generative work embraces the process and performance of art as a revolutionary act. This work most often addresses themes that deal with history, political thought, or ecology from an anti-capitalist perspective. At the same time, I am very interested in how we experience the world around us as individuals. Much of my work is self-reflective and acts as an attempt to contextualize my own thoughts and feelings around the greater state of the world. Balancing these macro political and micro interpersonal perspectives within my practice is at times intuitive and at other times conflicting. Sometimes these socio-political questions are clear and obvious in my work, at others they are significantly more obscured. This is something I continue to reconcile within myself as my practice continues to grow, shift, and evolve.

On technique... the use and manipulation of field recordings have become an important part of this equation. I believe that utilizing and obscuring recognizable sounds grounds my work in the complicated fabric of our world. Though I still use pitched instrumentation, sampling, and electronic manipulation of sounds, my work strives to center the field recordings rather than relegating them to the background and stripping them of their locality (and thus much of their sociopolitical relevance).

I maintain an interest in interdisciplinarity through my generative practice and question both how to create at the crossroads of music and theatre beyond escapist forms of art like the Broadway musical and how to consider the audience as essential actors within a radical happening rather than silent witnesses of an event in which they have no active role. We have a plethora of examples of radical happenings within the world of rock, pop, or hip-hop concerts and their ability to inspire and activate audience to dance, mosh, scream, jump, etc. Is there a means of generating this kind of energy within contemporary performance and directing this energy in a more political direction?

If so, how?
I contextualize the process of artistic creation through a dramaturgical lens which both supports and contrasts my political concept of artmaking.

For me, dramaturgy involves what questions we ask ourselves when and how we use these questions to generate the structures and circumstances that ground our creations.

I am very interested in creating a concrete dramaturgy of sound (through field recording, harmony/melody, or otherwise) in my pieces and in collaboration with other artists. I question how sound can be used to maintain an essential spark of the radical potential of art in a variety of artistic contexts, many of which are not interested in political outcomes.

Is it possible to create art that actually acts as an agent of change or form of rebellion within our current society where even the most radical pursuits have been thoroughly co-opted by the rich and powerful?
How can we create work that is aesthetically strong, rigorous, beautiful, and moving while maintaining a clear sociopolitical perspective and challenging audiences and ourselves to resist the status quo?

How do we reconcile the need to make a living within the capitalist society while keeping our work itself focused on subverting that same social order?
Does making any profit off our art negate this subversion from the jump or is there a means of finding a legitimate balance between these poles?

If art is about what questions you are asking yourself when – then these are my questions right now.