Artist’s Statement
for the past few months i’ve been spending my mornings working on a series of small collages on musical manuscript paper. i’ve currently finished around 200 of them. basically the floor beneath my desk is covered with many layers or remnants from past collage work, so i simply reach down, grab a few things from the floor, sift through them, and cut out an inspired nugget or two. unlike the rest of my work in painting, sculpture, film, drawing and sound, there is no conceptual framework or system determining my process, and the intuitive gathering and forming has become a small ritual, beginning my studio day—perhaps attempting to approach cage’s dictum: to sober and quiet the mind.
the scores are open ended in terms of their possibilities of use. i am interested in them being performed on many different levels—from acoustically or electronically in the world to silently in the mind. i’ve performed many of them myself. as scores, objects, or artworks, they exist somewhere between graphic notation, concrete poetry, and fortune cookie fortunes. rather than determining details, they merely attempt to suggest beginnings and explore the notion of “reading”—wondering what a piece of paper with words and marks can suggest in terms of a sound-making or listening action, as well how deep, intricate, or sympathetic a reading can become. they are recent, unresolved and intimate sketches.