The Witness, 2023

The artist, broom, jumpsuit and hat, landfill, earth; 5 min. 38 sec.

I performed this piece at the site of an indiscernible mixed waste inactive landfill, at 7th Street and The Rio Salgado in Phoenix, Arizona. My impossible task: removing the landfill. I was inspired by Susanna Battin’s, Leave No Trace and Francis Alÿs’, When Faith Moves Mountains. The title, The Witness, references the role of historical landscape paintings that depicted a lone figure looking out into the wilderness. Jonathan Bordo writes,”The specular witness performs a rather special and dual role. It exalts a picture that testifies to an unpicturable condition-the wilderness sublime-while simultaneously legitimating, as a landscape picture, terrain violently seized, dispossessed of its indigenous inhabitants, and reconstituted as territory. ” (Picture and Witness at the Site of the Wilderness)

Spring 2021, Essay for Maggot Brain Magazine

JULY 2021

Yosemite National Park, Parson’s Lodge Talk 

Video drawing from artist’s family photographic archive. Slides of photographs taken in Yosemite National Park in the 1970’s by artist’s grandfather Caroll Walker, all centered around mostly one peak. Video played behind Francisco Cantú while he read essay exploring the violent history that helped shape contemporary notions of wilderness in Yosemite National Park. 

December 2020

Audio production and engineering for Orion Magazine Online. A conversation between Cristina Rivera Garza and Francisco Cantú.

December 2019-Ongoing

Collaborative residency with Francisco Cantú and Alex White of Rezpiral in Tule, Oaxaca where we explore and discuss communal lands, food sovereignty and the milpa in the context of mezcal production and its neighboring vernacular enterprises.

diøscuri at Biosphere 2

April 2019

Only Roses

For this piece I worked alongside Adriana Kanoza to develop the musical element to accompany her installation ‘Only Roses’. We worked with ableton, pulling from her previous work as a musician as well as field recordings she collected throughout the spring. Throughout the installation, the sound piece could progress on its own, with loops built in, but could also be played and altered as Adriana moved fluidly between interacting with people in attendance and tending to the musical performance. The installation itself was an exploration of her ancestor’s long-rooted history in Tucson. Adriana used photography, her own portraiture work and historical familial portraiture, candles, the scent of creosote, an altar and the transition of day to night to highlight the liminality of past and present, of those in her family beyond the veil and her current living community.

January 2019

Music video completed for Lisa/Liza! My thoughts about the experience, and a link to the video’s GoldFlakePaint premier.

“The greenhouses where we shot are owned by a world renowned botanist based just outside Tucson. They're a little island, surrounded by Sonoran desert. It's two acres of succulents and orchids from all
around the world. They're a threshold, bringing the larger world within reach, on an intimate scale. The orchid house, especially, is warmer, fuller, packed with airplants and beautiful flowers. Kind of junglelike, but not claustrophobic because every time your eyes move over the space, they're pulled into these bright gorgeous colors and forms all hypnotizing you into their
tiny universes.

I feel Liza's songs do something very similar, bringing the sublime and the very intimate together with beauty and tenderness and patience.There's a rich and resounding interiority to her songs that unfurls into these larger and larger arrangements. It's so seamless, and Isuddenly find myself somewhere else when the song is over. I get pulled in and lose track of time. They're magical in that way and I wanted to make the video feel magical too, a warmth and light emmanating from all the little signs of life around her as she moved through the space. I wanted her to be woven into it, for that magic to be contingent upon her initiation, and so I decided to make a sequence where the flowers and plants would glow when she touched them.

October 2018

Week-long collaboration with Borderlands Restoration Network & Land Arts of the American West at the University of New Mexico

As a visiting artist facilitator, I collaborated with Francisco Cantú to create a two part activity for the UNM LAAW students. For my segment of the activity, I composed a place-based sound bath, incorporating field recordings from the environment wherein the piece was to be experienced, playing with the division between the natural and constructed environment. The piece positions the placed-ness and physicality of sound in dialogue with participants expectations and experience of time.

Live scoring of Heaven and Earth Magic:

May 2018

Nathanael Myers premieres "breathe"- a contemporary movement piece drawing inspiration from the moments in life where one's breath are the only words available. Dancers Isolde Edminster-Genet, Allison Knuth, Samantha McKinney, Hanna Moreno, and Lauren Renteria move in profound unity to articulate the experience of bliss through movement. An atmospheric art installation, "insufflate", will immerse the audience in an ethereal cloudscape. Paired with a luring and meditative orchestration of natural sounds from sound artist Karima Walker, the sound collaboration of Myers and Walker gives a framework to the movement and art.

March 2020

Score for performance, inspired by Dr. Andreas Webers’ Matter and Desire. Commissioned by KJ Dalaw.

May 2019

This spring I had the incredible opportunity to collaborate again with Nathanael Myers for a performance at the Biosphere 2, a world class institution for research. The project was called diøscuri:

“an exploration through movement, sound, and immersive installation, dwelling on the notion of a ‘divide of self’, coexisting halves and their oscillating relationship. Nathanael Myers and Karima Walker, in collaborative performance, create within the active lung of the Biosphere 2.”

These dualities abound at Biosphere 2, whose mission is to, “advance our understanding of the natural and man-made environment through unique experimentation…to address grand challenges that affect the quality of life and the understanding of our place in the universe.”

The legacy, mission and lung of the Biosphere 2 (the latter an engineering marvel in and of itself), proved to be a rich place to explore one’s relationship to and constructed separation from the natural world. Can these divides and dualities be overcome?

Using video from around and inside the Biosphere 2, as well as voice, tones and field recordings to generate live feedback from the physical structure of the lung, I juxtaposed these notions of the self, the natural world and one’s place within it.

For this project, I composed a piece of music for Nathanael’s choreography, as well as a shorter sound piece for an ongoing installation we ran throughout the day. Additionally, I shot and produced a video for my performance and the installation.

The project was made possible, in part, by a grant from the Arts Foundation for Tucson and Southern Arizona.

Diøscuri was covered by Arizona Illustrated, and you can watch coverage of it here. Top left photo by Desdeneyra Elias.

The song takes off at the end, and I wanted the imagery to too, where
a kind of collage of the essence of all these forms would transition
into a completely new space. So I used footage from one of my favorite drives on tour while Liza and Owen Ashworth and I were playing a few shows together in the west.

We drove up from Albuquerque into Denver, passing though essentially a seven hour transition zone from desert into a huge mountain valley. It takes all day, and cell service is bad and there's no where to stop and you watch these super wide mountain ranges slowly creep in closer and closer until you wind right through them to drop down into Denver. I layered, with hand held video, stretches of these mountains over each other, so they'd move and shake, becoming object-like while still maintaining their scale as the song opens out into saturated layers of loops and distortion.”

September 2018

I shot, edited and directed this music video for Advance Base’s song, ‘Christmas in Nightmare City’, on his new record Animal Companionship. Out now on Run For Cover and Orindal.