Art Statement and Resume

A challenge to the popular notion that people will always take the easy way emerged when my collaboration partner Jeff de Castro and I presented the installation, Heaters, in 1991 at Mobius Performance Space in Boston. Here’s how it happened.

The show was to be a group of installations by Boston artists. Ours happened to be the only one that could not be strolled through. Its content was concealed. Our seed stimulus had been a curious newspaper account of a stalled death sentence. The state in question had not handed down a death sentence for so many years that no one could be found who knew how to operate its electric chair. The condemned prisoner waited in limbo while the state tried to recruit an expert to run the chair.

The small concrete block interior was dark, deep and cramped. Visitors had to enter through a slit. Since only two or three could come in at a time, a ‘gatekeeper’ controlled entry. A line began to grow as more and more people waited to get in. People emerging were flushed. Passersby were drawn to this exterior spectacle. The longer the line grew, the greater the attraction. The line became the installation (for which the rest served as generator). Once inside, viewers were subjected to random blinding flashes of light making it impossible to see (in the ordinary sense). The flashes played on the rate of dark adaptation in the eye, creating after-images. Most vision was in the form of these afterimages stimulated by the light flashes. Viewers could also hear the sounds of a motorized camera from above (as they were being shot with infrared film). They could also hear the sounds of someone operating an electric typewriter. They could not hear the sountrack of 60 cycle hum except during brief intervals when it shut down and the silence made it notable as missing..In this way the sound was analogous to the light flashes in that it stimulated a kind of 'after-audition--noticeable by its lack. Only through these “screens” of interference could they make out an arrangement of human, organic and mechanical presences--forming the kinetic sculpture which was the interior 'machine' producing the line outside. Despite our ideas which had focused almost exclusively on the interior, what we had built was a delaying mechanism: an exhilaration machine.

The installation was compelling for reasons beyond what we had thought we had built. The deferred expectation of seeing and hearing, followed by the effort to overcome the physical barriers to doing so, produced exhilaration. The Law of Attraction and The Desire to Penetrate overcame the complacency and ease of the stroll.

Kay Divant Studio, 65 Roebling Street, 3rd Floor, Brooklyn, NY 11211

SELECTED EXHIBITIONS

1997-2004

Vermont Studio Center Residency, writer’s grant.

William Matthews 2003 Poetry Prize.

Group show, Hall of Art, Williamsburg, Brooklyn, NY.

‘Fated 9’ (Offal Art, with Breuk Iversen, Dmitri Gubin & Timothy Ryan), The State of Art, Greenpoint, NY.

‘Apple Core’ (Offal Art, with Breuk Iversen, Dmitri Gubin & Timothy Ryan), McCaig-Welles, Williamsburg, Brooklyn, NY.

‘Subtext’, DNA, Provincetown, MA.

‘Cheap Thrills’, DNA, Provincetown, MA.

Pediatric AIDS Benefit Invitational Group Show ('Anything But Paper Prayers'), Barbara Krakow Gallery, Boston.

‘A Place in it’, Sideshow, Williamsburg, Brooklyn, NY.

Pediatric AIDS Benefit Invitational Group Show ('Anything But Paper Prayers'), Barbara Krakow Gallery, Boston.

1991-1994

‘Traffic-Ticket Defense’, Speedway Gallery at IPA, Boston.

‘Untitled, 1994’, IPA (Institute of Progressive Art), Boston.

Pediatric AIDS Benefit Invitational Group Show ('Anything But Paper Prayers'), Howard Yeserski Gallery, Boston.

‘Pieces of Writing’, The Artists Foundation, Boston.

‘NEA/DOA: Radice’s Nightmare’, Mobius, Boston.

‘Ligation in Progress’, (installation with Jeffrey de Castro), Mobius, Boston.

‘Cadavre Exquis’, (with Emmett McDermott and Michael Beauchemin), The Drawing Center, New York.

‘Pillow Talk’, MIT List Visual Arts Center, at 88 Room, Allston, MA.

‘Up in the Air’, (installation of copper plates, with Michael Costello paintings and Phillip Schwartz sculpture), Mills Gallery, Boston Center for the Arts.

‘It was Funny, Recalls Former Child’ (collaborative installation curated by Emmett McDermott), The Cyclorama, Boston Center for the arts.

‘Society Says’, Harbor Gallery, UMASS Boston.

‘Preaching to the Converted’, 88 Room, at Mobius, Boston.

‘Heaters’, (installation with Jeffrey de Castro), Mobius, Boston.

‘Summer Sonnet I-IV’, (serial installations with Jeffrey de Castro), Harbor Gallery at UMASS Boston.

‘Get Who?’ (sound installation), ‘Nuclear Solstice’ Mills Gallery, Boston Center for the Arts.

‘Culture’ (permanent site-specific installation (graphic design John Gonella), Tables of Content, The Loading Zone, Boston.

Fort Point Channel and Spectacle Island installation projects, Reclamation Artists, Boston.

‘A Tribute to Albert Grokoest’, memorial reading, New York Society for Ethical Culture.

Books/Text Sets

Thrill of Anarchy, (chapbook), Geanie, Boston, 1989 (ISBN 0-9625038-0-0).

Body Velocity: Reproductions of Poems & Objects, Geanie, Boston, 1989 (ISBN 0-9625038-1-9).

Rat Packet: Texts for Nine People (edition of 18), 1991

Frigobar, (edition of 200), 1992.

My Terradigms are Paradigms: Rants Against Lists, (unpublished, copyright 1997)

Mnemorer (wordforms published on http://www.mnemorer.blogspot.com/ copyright 2000)

Background

I grew up as a musical prodigy and formally trained pianist, performing in public from age three and studying at the University of Tulsa School of Music, Piano Preparatory throughout childhood, studying under Dorothy Bowen, a pupil of Artur Schnabel.  I later studied privately in Los Angeles under Edith Knox, a pupil of Alexander Siloti (a Liszt pupil). I also studied organ with Jeanne Gentry Waites of Tulsa University and later Robert Pritchard, organist of Pasadena Presbyterian Church.  Thus ended childhood.

At university, I studied English literature (with emphasis on Modernism in British and Irish Fiction and Poetry). I studied privately and took piano master classes under Johana Harris (Debussy exponent) and master classes with others. 

I graduated magna cum laude from UCLA with a Bachelor of Arts.  Later, I taught English Composition, and read Medieval Literature, Swift and Sterne, and Post-1970s Literary Critical Theories at University of New Hampshire, Durham, taking a Master of Arts degree with no distinctions. While working in Wall Street from 1996 to 2004 as an editor of global emerging markets bond research, I took courses at the New York Institute of Finance.