Vinyl

I’ve been collecting vinyl records for a long time. While researching the history of these recordings, I often find myself meditating on the tactile element of touch–on all the hands that have made contact with these revolving disks. Whether the recording is classical, contemporary, or another musical genre, the physical object is a manifestation of a deep appreciation of that particular music and the compulsion over time to listen again and again.  And this doesn’t just involve swiping an app on one’s phone; in order to listen, one must first thumb through a record collection, pull out the selected cover, carefully remove the record from its sleeve, gingerly set it on the turntable, even more gingerly set the needle, turn on the turntable, and then flip the record over when the first side is done playing.

With the history of listening, then, is the story of physical connection–a story that some might interpret as being undermined when, as part of my process, I cut into the guts of amalgamated materials, in this case discarded records. Yet although it might seem a bit counter intuitive, and possibly even irreverent to the recorded medium, my hope is to take these deconstructed and recontextualized records and to revitalize and assign new meaning to them.  In this way I continue their story by handling them in a new way, making a new recorded history of intention and random chaos.

Inherent in my contemporary practice is the quest to investigate a new way of mark making, surgically cutting through the facades of art in an attempt to go behind and beyond the surface and penetrate to its structural underpinnings. The resulting pieces of my finished, reassembled vinyl collection invite the viewer to contemplate the embedded history of sight, sound and tactile sensation.  Those who, as they touched and savored their favorites, created the embedded history that these pieces non-representationally gesture toward, are the origin points of the story. In constructing permanent meditations on their tactile listening habits, I celebrate them and continue the story.