REDSTARTstudio

Between 1994 and 2000 I became very interested in the “quality” of numbers, particularly when they become arranged in certain orders. While reading W.S. Andrews Magic Squares and Cubes (published in 1908) I came across the Jaina equilibrium square which “represents a distribution of the figure values in what might be called absolute equilibrium.” This discovery informed a large body of work which included prints, drawings and constructions. The square and it’s 16 permutations provided a constructional and decorative foundation for these works, and, at the time, the avenues down which I was traveling seemed endless … Some drawings c.1999:

Installed at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Portland, Maine, in the winter of 2000, the wall drawing “Woodnotes” measured 8 x 30 feet. The marks in the drawing were silk screened  wave forms of the sounds of 10 selected birds recorded at Baxter State Park in the Spring of 1999.

The audio was triggered by a motion detector as the viewer passed by the drawing. The bird songs  echoed throughout the gallery. The birds recorded are: Least Flycatcher, Red-eyed Vireo, Oven Bird, Yellow-rumped Warbler, Red-breasted Grossbeak, Wood Thrush, Eastern Wood-pewee, Chestnut-sided Warbler, Yellow Warbler. You can also hear hungry Mosquitoes attacking the microphone and water rushing along the trail.

Woodnotes -- Installation views

Tent = Matrix & Rain = Medium

I think that a better title might be “Unintentional Print (the only one)”. The video was shot while driving west to move to Oakland. We were camping that night somewhere in Colorado just off Route 50 in August of 2001. There was a light rain over night.

“PUZZLES & CURIOUS PROBLEMS” — Screenprints — 19″ x 23″
 each
Lauri and Peter completed these prints while on residency at the Frans Masereel Centrum Kasterlee, Belgium in 1998. Illustrations were scanned from an two 18th century encyclopedia pages that had entries for “B” & “P”. We recombined the illustrations in these prints to create a feeling of movement, expectation, action and reaction.

Bird stamp kit is a set of rubber stamps I made from sonograms of North American birds. I would take these stamps out into the field and listen. When I heard a bird song I would take the stamp of that bird and stamp on the page in an area that I thought the bird was singing from. I was represented by a red dot in the middle of the page. These drawings became sound maps of a particular day, time and place. Oh, yeah. I had to learn all the bird songs first.