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Deities of Sound are a group of pieces, which I am currently making that
create sound by being activated by breath, wind and motion. This series
of sounding images occurred to me in a relatively short and surprising
period of time and were evoked by both conscious and unconscious levels
of thought. The immediacy of their conception made me feel at the time
that it was more important to build them than to analyze their nature
and meaning. However much they seemed a natural progression of previous
work I had done, this work would engage a spiritual part of me that I
had not yet encountered in my art-making processes. Now that I have completed
and exhibited this first stage of the group of figures, I've begun to
unravel the significance of what this work means to me.
In creating these pieces, many peculiar aesthetic and structural problems have presented themselves and required unusual solutions. This has caused me to learn and create construction techniques that are specific to these forms which begin solid and are hollowed to become musical resonators. Other parts are thrown or slab constructed with clay musical instruments imbedded within them. Each musical part, including whistles that are activated by tipping motions which move water between chambers and displace air, are carefully tuned and their shrinkage for pitch change calculated. Through the many hours, days and weeks I have spent with each Deity, I have retained a sense of having learned from every individual piece. From the beginning, when I recalled the first of these images from dreams I was having at the time, it has been an important tenant of the Deities that they retain an impossibleness in their figurative sensibilities. I want very disparate and abstract forms to combine in gestural and graceful ways. In this same way, I created unusual harmonic and tonal musical instruments to go inside each piece, usually from four to six instruments inside each Deity. This unlikely figurative and musical quality gives these works an otherworldliness, an insisting proposition that their world and sensibilities are different from those of our very mechanical and predictable world. If there are separate realities and worlds (which I have found through my dreams), the harmonic and physical configurations of these pieces create bridges to their peaceful places of residence. They are meant to suggest and render the possibility of another intelligence with which we might be a part. They invite us to interact, to partake of their resonance, while reminding us that we too are akin to vessels that resonate. They are meant to be saviors, for humankind and myself. R is my hope that we, by perceiving the still and peaceful worlds of these Deities, might help to calm and center our own existence. This
statement accompanied the premiere of the Deities of Sound exhibition
at the Couturier Gallery in Los Angeles, CA
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