I heard the light in the reeds and it smelled like home, 2018

Reeds, moss, steel and wood platforms, plastic bins, hot lights, speakers, extension cords, shovel, broom, sound, water. Installation view.

In this installation there were four tracks, sourced from four different sites, playing into the same space out of four different speakers. This mixdown is an approximation of what it might be like to stand in the middle while they all play loudly, and the sound becomes more than anything a collective movement of air. I would start listening around five minutes, it takes a moment for things to get interesting.

In a way, this installation is a drawing— an investigation into the mark-making practice that is my own process of orienting my self within continuously shifting external geographies. It is built of patches of earth, reeds, and moss gathered from past homes around Philadelphia, and of the tools I used to gather and assemble those pieces. The labor of carrying each fragment into this space is a familiar gesture. It re-enacts my own struggle to assemble some sense of internal geography out of the vastly different sites I've called home over the past 22 years. It re-enacts the methodical repetition of archiving, arranging, packing, moving. It re-enacts the meditative process of home- building, of arranging and re-arranging the physicality of my surroundings. The act of digging, carrying, and re-planting each element in this installation gives physical form to my internal search for grounding in transience. The space that is born of these mappings is certainly fragmentary, but nonetheless emerges as a landscape: piles and gaps, parched and dripping, messy decay and displaced growth.

Sound, as a drawing tool, has the almost mystical ability to conjure multiple settings in one site. One track is coming out of each speaker— a single-take auditory impression of sites in motion. The organized chaos of public transit in Philadelphia and Buenos Aires, the cacophony of a river bank in Richmond VA and water running through my apartment here on Pine. Each track, individually, would ground the listener in one location. Bumping into each other in the air between the speakers, they weave a new landscape that is dissonant and harmonious, here and there, then and now.