In August 2022, I began co-curating with Sophia Sobers and Laura Horne a series of small, one-night-only group exhibitions called On the Edge of the Infinite. The focus of these exhibitions would be on artwork emphasizing light, sound, video, performance, and the ephemeral. For the first iteration of this series, each of us (the co-curators) created an installation and did a live sound performance to set the direction for these events.
My performance was called End-Times Playlist. In my artwork, I often borrow imagery from historical diagrams of the 1796 Transit of Venus, a historical event observed from synchronized vantage points by teams of intrepid scientists scattered across the world. For End-Times Playlist, I recreated a close up of one of these diagrams using sequins. My aim here was to create what was essentially a kind of disco ball “scattered light” effect at the scale of a rug. To do this, I pointed lights at it to bounce the reflections upwards. A neon arch called Eidolon appears overhead.
To create this type of sound, I am more interested in removing distinctive qualities of the guitar than in observing established guitar aesthetics. The distinctive pluck of the string, a.k.a., the “attack”, is shaved off, instead creating swells. And rather than creating the pristine tones most recordings aspire to, I introduced noise, warble and lowered the characteristic brightness we are accustomed to in conventional recordings.
Eidolon, 2023
Conceptually, this piece continues my inquiry into common perceptions of End-Times. For example, in the mass media, cataclysmic scenarios are generally portrayed as evoking the basest of human instincts on a wide scale. What else might the end of the world look like? How else might we cope with an End-Times scenario? David Bowie’s song Five Years explored this subject matter in vivid details, envisioning scenes occurring in a world where we are aware that only five years remain, presumably of life as we know it. End-Times Playlist reimagines the sounds of End-Times not as something decadent and extreme but rather something tender and heartbroken.