SELECTED WRITINGS AND ESSAYS
between Gods & Dogs (MFA Honors Thesis, University of Kansas, 2020)
between Gods & Dogs is an exhibition, comprised of two installations, that raises questions about belief, authority, knowledge, and power. The Word That Binds Them is an interactive installation involving books that have been put in positions of authority or treated as sacred by religions, political parties, academic institutions, and other communities. As viewers navigate the work, they are faced with questions surrounding power and ideological belief. The project involves consultations with the Internet Sacred Text Archive, research of citation rankings, and discussions with followers of various belief systems to inform the selections of books. All of these texts play an important role in historical and present-day power structures. The work demonstrates how art—specifically interactive art—is rich territory for questioning and deconstructing systematic ideologies and our interactions with them as humans. While The Word That Binds Them questions the beliefs, knowledge, and power we acquire from books, Most Retrieved Words questions what we might learn from an unexpected source—our canine companions. The project began by engaging the general public in order to collect sounds of their dogs barking and short writings describing what they have learned from their dogs. What can dogs teach us about freedom, play, curiosity, love, forgiveness, risk, danger, and other important concepts? The collected sounds are altered so that they embody qualities of sacred choral music. Visual content in the work is comprised of hundreds of videos of dogs that have been extracted from found footage. These individual videos are composited into an immersive four-channel video projection that contains thousands of dogs running in mass along the walls of the gallery. This paper outlines the methodologies used to create an art experience that inspects theological, political, academic, and nonanthropological sources of belief.
Also available at https://kuscholarworks.ku.edu/handle/1808/31557
Analyzing and Reinterpreting Dimensions of Bach’s Harmonic Rhythm (2016)
The primary part of this thesis project analyzes the harmonic rhythm of J. S. Bach’s “Herr, unser Herrscher”, the opening chorus from St. John Passion. While several theorists from the 20th century have addressed harmonic rhythm in terms of the metrical position of chord changes, some more recent publications have explored ways to analyze harmonic rhythm in greater detail. This paper explains these methods of analysis as well as the differences and additions made to those methods. Furthermore, the project provides a modernized transcription of Bach’s work, an analysis underneath the score, and a commentary that illuminates some important aspects of this work in respect to harmonic rhythm. An additional part of this project involves new musical material. Explanations of compositional processes will be provided for reinterpreting the analysis from “Herr, unser Herrscher”. Elements from Bach’s music will govern the procedure, but these elements are used in different ways so that they may no longer be recognizable. The author’s personal goal for this project is to demonstrate how tradition can be filtered through a 21st century lens and how music from our history can inspire new works.