A group of elderly ramblers passed by our front door on the way to their hearth, 2017
Field recordings, text & LED signage.
A pair of speakers are breathing in the gallery. They alternate between playing field recordings of the loud, celebratory music that the Chengdu park-goers are dancing or exercising to and an almost-too-quiet, ambient "park-tone." Wall-text, installed low, has been taken, unedited from my phone's Notes app. One entry describing a Sichuan soundscape, runs the length of a sixty-four foot long wall.
Elderly ramblers... explores rhythm in a musical, embodied, and poetic sense. What's lost and what's gained when the rhythms of a tourist and a place fall into, or out of sync? This body of work begins in—and meanders from—the Sichuan province capital of Chengdu, China, where I spent five weeks as a visitor, totally alienated and bewildered. The only places I got closest to finding peace were the public parks where I sipped tea or listened to the music playing for the theatrically-costumed weekend performers, the gentle waltzers, the sweaty exercisers, the proud patriots.
First exhibited in Who Gets to Look, a two–person exhibition curated by Virginia Arce at the University of California, Irvine's University Art Gallery in January, '17 and then in another two-person self-initiated show with Stef Halmos in Downtown LA the following year. Project support via the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston's traveling fellows program. Custom typography by Armin Roth.
Audio Playlist (field recording excerpt); PDF (curator's essay).