These works are preliminary responses to my subject matter that enable me, in early stages of thinking, to imagine what the relationships might be between my subject matter and myself. I consider them both serious and playful.
IDIOLECT This is a sound project funded by the Visual and Critical Studies department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. During the summer of 2007, I worked with a voice coach and speech pathologist–beginning with a recording of myself as a kid in 1974–to teach me the dialect I might have spoken had there not been clear cultural and educational pressures to erase regional influences. An impossible task, of course, the resulting sound piece asks questions about how a quality of voice might inform my own sense of a shifting temporality. LISTEN HERE. Read the script HERE. This work has been exhibited once in 2010 for the exhibit Southern Art? curated by Teresa Bramlette Reeves and Ben Goldman for Georgia State University’s Ernest G. Welch Gallery in downtown Atlanta.
After Steve Reich, I also made the audio sketch, Goodbye, which takes seriously the idea that body vibration might inflect perception. The first line is me at the age of five at the end of a family Christmas audio cassette recording saying: “Everyone’s going to say ‘goodbye’ in their regular voice.” The rest of the composition is the repetition of the word “goodbye” in both Standard American and a dialect that reflects my early geographic and cultural context. Listen HERE.
PREVIEWS This sketch imagines a connection to the subjects of my research, beginning with an archived letter between two lovers in the early to mid-1950s, Jack Strouss and William Deveaux Wilson. Bill, living and working at the time in California, writes back to Jack about his loneliness. While working in the Warner Brothers Beverly Hills theater, he writes: “Sometimes when I’m up in the balcony, watching the theatre operate, there in the dark, while the drama and sadness of ‘Country Girl’ spreads across the theatre, I wander to thoughts of you, and before long I am crying again.”
Based on the trailer for Country Girl (Grace Kelly, Bing Crosby, William Holden), this clip brings the affair between two men in the 1950s into a fictional realm in which Bill’s unpublished novel, September Venus, has achieved the status its author sought. It also acknowledges a creative and fictionalized relationship between researcher and historical subjects, while playing with the idea of melodrama as a historical trope.
IMAGES
Palimpsest series. After Wojnarowicz’s Rimbaud in New York series, these images complicate archived letters with portraits of both my historical subjects and my partner. This work has been exhibited in the 2008 MOCA GA Art Gala and as part of E.G. Crichton’s Wandering Archives project in the exhibition, Nothing to Declare, at the Vargas Museum, Quezon City, Phillipines in 2011.
Composite series (left to right: Jolly Twelve and 539 Elmwood). This work takes the form of the tax assessor’s public records of city real estate and imagines what other kinds of memorial evidence might be included to reflect these places.
