Fever

EXHIBITION

WALKTHROUGH

A walkthrough of my exhibition currently on view at the Berman Museum of Art through November 2026. Much of the work revolves around a group of friends photographed in 1981 by the artist Allen Frame and published in his book Fever. From these images I’ve “cast” an imaginary band who I’ve inhabited as a way to perform and record the songs for my next album. Inside this make believe and my invented relationships with the “band members” are many layers of devotion, elegy, and a kind of time travel I often find myself attempting in both research and art making.

Interior Gallery Views

FEVER - Materials and Descriptions

VIDEO PERFORMANCE PROJECTIONS - Triptych (48 min) Before close each day the shades in the glass gallery will be opened and the triptych will begin playing around dusk and into the night. Built over 10 years of touring, these video works first began as large scale “companions” I projected during solo performances. I thought perhaps I could trick the audience and even myself into believing I wasn’t alone up there after all. This trickery soon became a kind of truth. Like the music, a provocation of breath and a visual recitation of life and will. The work is composed of archival and found footage of early AIDS activism (Ashes on the White House Lawn, die-ins in the streets of Manhattan), clips of modern and contemporary dance ( Arnie Zane and Bill T. Jones dancing together on NY Public Access TV, Merce Cunningham spinning endlessly as a young man against a pink sky), and captured moments of extreme climate events or ways in which human beings, often absurdly, interrupt the natural world (palm trees in a hurricane, calving ice caps, thousands of birds being released from a semi truck on a highway).

FEVER VIDEOS - Shot on a 1981 Sony Trinicon HVC 2800 and a 1991 Magnavox CR325. These videos depict “the band” spanning 1981-1991. The cameras are a kind of portal, a wardrobe leading to Narnia, a device which allows me to “see” into the past and thereby enter it. The videos, like dreams, are a hollow, filled by both want and the unconscious. A placeholder for precarious ideas that undo time. They blur the boundary between what is real, what could be real, what could be imagined, would could be described, or hoped for. They are physical in their nature, both in their making and how they are perceived, more box than flattened screen at a 4:3 aspect ratio, they become, at once, foreign and familiar through the literal lenses of abandoned technologies spanning the first decade of life.

Interior galleries titles/durations

Jody (13:41)

Mooreland, June 26, 1988 (12:19)

Walker (15:01)

Boone and Me (17:24)

Norm (8:26)

Self portrait in ‘81 (17:42)

The Ensemble (7:31)

It Was Evening All Afternoon (30:52) (projected onto drawings)

DRAWINGS Graphite, Charcoal, Ink on paper Devotional in nature, a way to be with the “band members” in meditative bursts.

PHOTOGRAPHS Unframed photographs varying in size between 4x6, 5x7, and 8 x12. The photos are bits of observation and documentation, throughout the process of writing and recording the music by “the band”. Many of the photos, like the found footage videos, depict encounters with the natural world interrupted. All photos were shot on color film, with the majority made by photographing projections of digital photographs. (Like photographing a diorama or a movie theater - see Arbus, Sugimoto, Wojnarowicz). This, like much of the larger piece, is a communication across time through old/new technology.

AUDIO PRELUDE- 2:05 / POSTLUDE - 2:22 plays aloud in gallery alternating every 20 min (POSTLUDE heard in this video) WALKMEN - Four walkmen containing 60 min cassettes. Recordings consist of interspersed “tape demos”, fully produced songs performed by “the band”, and text read aloud, excerpts from my daily writing practice during the process of writing and recording the album. Throughout the duration are slowed versions / elements/ excerpts of the songs a manipulation of time made by physically slowing the tape playback. TASCAM 246 FOUR TRACK PORTASTUDIO - Viewer can manipulate the mix thereby isolating performances within the mix of various “bandmembers”. Playback can also be slowed down and sped up. RECURRING THEMES ACROSS MEDIUM Communication between time through technology. The the old and new technologies become a lock and key, a kind of telescope one can look through to see across the boundary of time. I invented both “the band” and the performance videos to bear the burden of creation. These inventions became a chance for collaboration across time and temporality and discipline. Both an attempt at a larger scale when resources were scarce. Both a way to cheat practical impediments, but also to practice for some future I refuse to give up on. The interruption of the natural world by human beings, and likewise, encounters with the natural world that “interrupt” a human experience of modernity. Abandoned technologies and what we lost by abandoning them.