a provisional note about my current work in lieu of an artist statement

…since 2020 I have been preoccupied with the composition or making of components within a large, open-ended project of “songs” whose individual parameters (forces, duration, medium, and overall approach) vary substantially but which have so far been characterized as a group by their shared interest in words, speech, and code. In embarking on them I moved from a work paradigm informed by my (now past) life as a classical violist (in which projects largely took on fixed, definitive form from the start) to one in which other strands of my artistic background — the legacies of post-Cage experimental music, improvisation, and conceptualism; early encounters with the world of visual art; and open working processes and forms characteristic of Black diasporic musics — run together with the pronounced interests in text and vocality that began to develop as my ability to perform on the viola faltered due to injury.

It’s too early to make broad-brush assessments of this practice. But in the making I can identify that certain dispositions and themes have become amplified: formalism; minimal presentation; indeterminacy; a certain ‘documentary’ attitude towards material and subject matter; and a deepening concern with philosophy, colored in part by engagement with Afropessimist writers and the artists of the Black Arts Movement and global African revolutionary period which preceded them. And though I am a member of the microgeneration last to be born in the 20th century, I still feel the harsh winds of the storm called modernism at my back.

(note February 28, 2023)