Seven Springs, 2019

in collaboration with Chris McKelway
composition for 2 violins, 2 overhead projectors, collages printed on transparencies​​
violinists: Nigel Deane and Kanoa Ichinayagi

double accordion book, printed on riso

VII. CHORUS
1
I listened to Tartini, the composer Chris told me his piece is inspired by, 
as I delved back into the mining of images. 
I may have taken a step back from my newfound identity as worker, 
and recovered myself as an aesthete. 
Our talk took us to many places: 
my new installation idea, the sickening wealth of Beverly Hills and Venice, Venice, Italy, 
Robert Smithson and the Monuments of Passaic, 
being from this country, wanting to be from another country, 
no single origin, 
his El Camino from Arkansas, 
him driving trucks for seafood companies, 
me having to learn to properly drive trucks for art handling, 
and finally where we have started: Happy Together.

What is this search for ecstasy, when the mundane bogs you down? 
I guess my answer is to be elated in the mundane. 
To find beauty and meaning in freeways that both connect and weigh us down, 
enabling movement (vehicle) and blocking it (pedestrian). 
The vehicle of history on which we must circulate. 
The intrusion of Modernist dreams of democracy and progress 
into the decay of its actual realization. 
Or, as Chris puts it, 
the hard lines under which something dynamic, 
something dancing is happening. 

2
His description fits the imagery that I have of the gap between the freeways 
over the lake at Hollenbeck Park, 
on which the water shimmers in the daytime, 
and the red back lights of passing cars, glimmer at night. 
The time is Wong Kar Wai’s Happy Together: always repeating, never progressing. 
The culmination, or moment of ecstasy is the waterfall. 
The falls. Fall. 
We actually did begin our conversation that Saturday afternoon in March, 
talking about falls. 
I have mistaken the title of Chris’s composition, Seven Springs 
to mean the season “spring” 
and therefore, 
signify the passing of seven years. 
Curiously both spring and fall have water-related homonyms. 
While spring gives you the promise of rebirth, 
fall has you constantly 
falling down into memory until you reach oblivion. 
So it is good that Chris is offering me spring. 
​Primavera, my mother’s name. 
And we mustn’t forget that most successful uprisings happened in spring: 
May 68, Arab Spring, Prague Spring, Venezuela Spring…