polyphony

when i had my senior projects meeting with you and anthea, we talked about changing the subject matter for the cassette tape weavings. you asked me to think about what it is about myself that i want to reveal, and i am surprised i had to think about it for a couple of days because the answer to that question is and always has been: next to nothing. i am secretive to a fault, and have been so since i was a child. i go out of my way to keep layers between myself and the rest of the world; some are thinner than others but my privacy and my self-truth are things i guard closely albeit on a case by case basis – there are times when revealing things about myself is comfortable, but it’s not the reason i make art.

i make art is to reveal things about the world, not about myself. during the making of any given piece, things about myself are definitely revealed, but they are generally only revealed to me, for me. they are not explicitly represented in the final object nor are they intended to have any bearing on how the object is received or interpreted by others. my narrative is only about myself in tangential ways. it is primarily a narrative of questions, observations, materials, and processes.

the information i have been getting back from my peers and instructors in critiques for the past year has overwhelmingly shown me that i am indeed very present in my work despite intentionally obscuring myself, so i continue to believe that i’m doing things the way i’m supposed to be doing them. with this in mind, i have decided to return to my original idea for these weavings, which is to use found sound sources in the form of cassette tapes purchased at thrift stores.

one weaving will  consist of spoken word, and one will be music. each will function conceptually like a mix tape. all tapes collected for this piece will be commercially recorded. this is thematically correct for my thesis, which involves the processes of finding, collecting, and storing. these processes are an enormous part of my life (and have been since i was too young to understand what they were). they inform every aspect of my process and are the anchor points for everything i am working on right now.