Artist’s/Musician’s Statement:

An artist’s statement is for artists who work in galleries and museums and it serves as a way to educate the public or to create press materials for publication. However, it’s very rare that I present work in those types of highbrow venues—but it does happen sometimes. Therefore, I really like for my press materials to be another opportunity for creativity. 

I developed a personal writing style that combined the personal essay form with the rhetorical segues used in occult novels to disseminate my art/music and to describe myself in liner notes starting in about 2012. At that time I was pulling The Nine of Swords a lot in my Tarot deck which is a foreboding card predicting bad luck, entrapment, and chronic illness. 

I really don’t believe in the occult because I’m an atheist (I just don’t know why God would smite a good person or turn them bad) and I have a lot of problems with Surrealism—how it stems from art brut and how it became a luxury in high fashion—but I kept on with this poetic form in order to create an aura of mystery around my stage presence. If you want to make it in music-even in experimental music-then I do not suggest that you write like this or that you change your project name a lot as it’s confusing for the audience. 

Now I want to be very clear in my writing and I’ve spent the past two years practicing the personal essay and memoir form. I worry that if I’m not very clear that I’ll seem like I don’t know what I’m doing and I really don’t want to be perceived as an outsider artist. 

I did learn how to write an artist’s statement in school and now my education is what keeps me from being perceived as an outsider. I am influenced by a lot of art and music that sees deskilled creative labor as more egalitarian and so I didn’t take a traditional academic path in art and music. It may seem like I don’t know what I’m doing for that reason. 

For my dissertation in graduate school I wrote that my music and sound art were the result of influences in the radical communities I was involved in. I no longer believe that those communities will help me or care if I’m actually struggling and now I believe that they only exist to create cheap party music for fast times. I also believe that the term “radical” has become so watered down by advertising that it’s a useless designation now. I also think that self-care can be more radical and more empowering for some people than the idea that an elite community is out there caring for everybody all the time. Now I’m influenced by experimental music in club spaces in a different, more impassionate, way and I create sound baths. I like that the sound bath community is a community that is free to participate in, organized around the pursuit of peace. I also like that it is just perceived as sound rather than as a form of music. I also like noise in clubs that is just seen as raw noise rather than as a descendant of music. I’m very interested in how people organize around sound in a social way. In that sense my sound work still has something in common with sound art.

In the past seven years I have also started to create paintings so that I don’t lose my identity as an artist now that I am stuck in Alabama. I know that we’re supposed to be seen as totally free and constantly adventurous as artists, but that is really a myth that comes from wealth culture. In noise subculture you can just be honest about being stuck as a social condition and that honesty is something that I appreciate. I know that a lot of non-artists here won’t identify me as an arts laborer unless I’m painting. A lot of Southern art is a celebration of Southern culture, but I find it very hard to celebrate Alabama. I also primarily work in abstraction now. I know that we’re supposed to say that we love our local areas as artists and in D.I.Y. now, but it wasn’t always that way. I’m influenced by some of the ad hoc bricolage aesthetics that some of the creators use due to the poverty here, but I would say that as an abstract artist and musician working in improvisation that my personal vision and the social reality I live with impact the work more.