Advisor: Lorena Salcedo-Watson + Toby Buonagurio + Ezra Thompson

Sound & Vision

View of installed show

View of installed show

I consider myself to be a musician first and foremost, and a visual artist second. Nearly all work I create is within a context of how it can or will relate to music. The goal of Sound & Vision is to explore my creative identity through the depiction of various forms of repetition in sound and analog sound media. This repetition manifests in many ways and represents many of the cycles I have fallen into in my own art and music. I see this repetition as a way to display the way my mind approaches the ideas in my artwork as well as how I respond to them. I feel as though much of my work repeats the same themes, or the themes others have already applied to their work. I frequently find myself in loops—continually thinking that my ideas are too alike to those I’ve explored in the past, and questioning whether I am building upon motifs within my body of work or simply retreading old ground. Sound & Vision dissects my inner struggles as a creative through the lens of physical sound media and its repetition, whether that be functional repetition, dysfunctional repetition, or repetition through reproduction. Each type of repetition shows a different side of my creative self: The critic, the bootlegger, the esoterist. Repetition also appears in the mediums I gravitate towards working in. As a printmaker I am able to reproduce innumerable copies of an image as I see fit, and then some. As a ceramicist and sculptor I create molds that allow me to create identical copies of an item, almost as if being made in a factory. All of these things make up not only my body of work, but myself as an individual.

The body of work that comprises Sound & Vision combines the ceramic and printmaking disciplines to create a variety of two-dimensional and three-dimensional works with an emphasis on repetition of form– particularly between two and three dimensions, as well as experimental techniques and processes. The works displayed as part of Sound & Vision are three lithographs, each in both framed and unframed iterations, a guitar effects pedal, a series of three ceramic records and one print record, a hybrid woodcut-linocut print and an accompanying ceramic sculpture, and a large-scale ceramic installation piece, for a total of 14 pieces.

Things Are Getting Loopy

Things Are Getting Loopy, 2024, lithograph on foil in artist-built frame

Things Are Getting Loopy, 2024, lithograph on paper

Detail view of the foil version of the print

Things Are Getting Loopy is a lithograph depicting a cassette tape loop, which is an assembled musical/noise device consisting of magnetic audio tape spliced into a continuous loop to produce repeated figures of music or sounds, often to be manipulated further as a means of expression though experimental playback techniques– most famously as heard in William Basinski’s 2002 avant garde ambient releases, The Disintegration Loops. By depicting the tape loop in a state of recent construction– as evidenced by the loose screw and the razor blade leftover from the splicing process – I allude to the destructive nature of being in a pattern of creative self-feedback, while hopefully more clearly conveying to those who are ‘in the know’, my acknowledgement that the creative loop I find myself in is of my own creation. This further exemplifies my themes of repetition in the repetition of form that it shares with the ceramic cassettes of The Taper’s Section. The framed version of the print is draped with strands of loose magnetic audio cassette tape, in reference to the discarded tape that would be leftover in the creation of a tape loop.

23 Skidoo

23 Skidoo, 2024, lithograph on foil in artist-built frame

23 Skidoo, 2024, lithograph on paper

23 Skidoo: Happy Birthdelay to You, 2022, electronic effects-pedal

23 Skidoo is a lithograph that calls back to the final piece of my first semester as an art major back in 2022– the 23 Skidoo: Happy Birthdelay to You, a conceptual sound-art effects pedal that echoes the signal put into it with increasing distortion of pitch and speed the stronger the input-signal. The 23 skidoo was created to manipulate a sound-collage created from the audio of various home movies from my childhood, with the idea being that the strongest ‘memories’ would be most dissimilar to their original source, reflecting a philosophy I hold that the memories we think of as being the clearest are likely the most distant from reality; each time we recall a memory, we are not recalling the initial instant, but rather the most recent recollection, and as such we further distance ourselves from truth while becoming all the more sure that we are correct. This piece shows a distorted vision of that effect unit, its inputs and outputs breaking out of the margins of the image and out of the frame. It seems only fitting that in a body of work exploring my repetitious tendencies through the lens of repetition and duplication in audio, that I would recall my very first work that explored my relationship with the past through the subject of sound and repetition. The framed version of the print features a guitar cable that extends the subject beyond the margins of the page and into the tangible world, wherein its input is plugged into the output jack of the original 2022 effect pedal, further bookending the start and end of my time in the Stony Brook art department.

Lost In The Wash (Like A Novelty Sock)

Lost In The Wash (Like A Novelty Sock), 2024, lithograph on foil in artist-built frame with novelty sock installation

Lost In The Wash (Like A Novelty Sock), 2024, lithograph on paper

Detail view of print on paper

Closer view of print on foil

Lost In The Wash (Like A Novelty Sock) is a lithograph depicting a reverb pan; a tank with stretched metal springs with a transducer on either end– one acting as a transmitter, to send audio pulses through the springs, and the other as a receiver to pick up the reflected echoes of the sound as it conducts through the irregular medium. The use of spring reverb (and really just reverberation as an effect in general) in music has mostly been equated with water and the ocean, in large part due to its tight association with the surf music of the 1960s during its earliest popularity, and the overwhelming, somewhat artificial reflections it produces have thus been given watery-sounding terms like drip, splash, and wash. The idea of being ‘lost in the wash’ appealed to me as a continuation of my exploration of echo as lens to explore my relationship with creativity. The feeling of having a creative impulse that gets lost in the shuffle of countless others having the same idea feels inescapable to me. The hopelessness of thinking my work will not be recognized, drowned out by the countless others exploring the same concepts, leads me to doubt my own creative vision.

The thought of repetition of an idea not reinforcing the strength of it, but rather fading its boundaries and striping it of its distinction has a sort of irony to me that I felt compelled to explore further. I continued this idea of being ‘lost in the wash’ by producing the image in a tusche wash that is a bit more gestural and less defined, not to mention the apt dubbing of the technique also as a ‘wash’. The inclusion of the sock signifies the more literal meaning of something being lost in the wash, with the trope of socks getting lost in the laundry being a fitting metaphor to me. An ordinary sock getting lost in the wash is something that goes unnoticed since there are plenty of other socks that will go alongside its ‘mate’ without issue. It’s only when a fun novelty sock goes missing that you notice because suddenly the remaining half of the pair loses its purpose– as there is no longer a match for it, it’ll likely be discarded. The framed version of the print is accompanied by an assortment of mismatched novelty socks draped from the frame and affixed to the wall.

All three lithographs were printed in small edition sizes of roughly 10 standard prints on a light slate-grey paper, as well as a much smaller number printed on holographic foil stock. This was directly influenced by my love for concert posters, and the tendency for certain shows to have an extremely limited number of foil edition prints at the merch stand– often times, in order to have a chance at a foil edition of a concert poster, you need to line up outside of the venue well before doors open, sometimes hours in advance; something which I’ve done more times than I’d care to admit. As concert posters are almost always serigraphs, especially in the case of concert posters with foil versions (in researching to find the foil stock to print on, I couldn’t find an instance of any technique other than silkscreen being used to print on foil), printing lithographs on the foil stock proved to be a particular challenge that required trial and error to not only get prints to display proper detail and value, but also chemical intervention to get prints to dry given that the plasticized surface does not allow for any absorption of the ink into the paper. All prints are framed in self-built maple frames, which allowed me full freedom to work in unusual print sizes. All prints are deliberately formatted to non-standard sizes, as in the past I would work exclusively in common print sizes (due to their use for most concert posters) such as 11×17” and 18×24”.

Broken Records I-IV

Broken Record I: Side A, 2025, glazed ceramic with kintsugi

Broken Record II: Side B, 2024, drypoint with intaglio collagraph in artist-built frame

Broken Record III: Side C, 2025, painted ceramic

Broken Record IV: Side D, 2024, glazed ceramic

Installation view of Broken Records I-IV

The phrase “like a broken record” most often refers to when a vinyl record has a scratch in its grooves, resulting in an unintentional and unwanted locked-groove effect, in which a single rotation worth of audio is repeated ad nauseum. To be told that you are like a broken record means that you repeat yourself over and over. I have been called a broken record many times throughout my life due to my tendency to talk a lot about the topics I’m passionate about. Over time, I started to feel like a broken record too, wondering if I’ve creatively fallen into a locked groove between the themes of my art, and tropes that I’ve found myself abusing in my music.

With the Broken Record series, I wanted to push myself from inadvertently being like a broken record, into deliberately repeating things as much as I could think to, in order to truly embody a broken record. A broken record repeats itself, but why can’t repetition have variation within it? Through Broken Records I-IV, I explored alternate meanings of the term ‘broken record’, playing off the idea of emotional brokenness that a record might feel after being chided for repeating itself, to a physically shattered record in both fragmented and ‘repaired’ states. The record repaired with kintsugi (Side A) in particular has an irony in the fact that even after repairing a broken record, it would not be able to be played– It may seem like a fix, but for all the effort of repairing it, it will never be given its function back; it will never be useful again. Each broken record represents a different side of a 2LP ‘Double Album’ set, paying homage to the lengthy multi-record conceptual works of the progressive rock and art rock bands who have influenced me as a musician and an artist, and the way in which I see this set as a distillation of my own creative sense of ‘conceptual continuity’.

Broken Records I, III, and IV (Sides A, C, and D) are ceramic, while Broken Record II is an intaglio print produced from an actual broken record (a scratched copy of Three Dog Night’s Around The World live album, to be specific), with the center cut out and done in drypoint to produce the label. Broken Records I and IV (Sides A and D) are both initially produced as embossed ‘prints’ of a linocut matrix in order to produce the texture of the grooves, with one being smashed and reassembled with kintsugi techniques to produce a free-standing 3D-leaning sculptural piece, and the other being displayed as a 2D-leaning wall-hanging piece. Broken Record III (Side C) is the most sculpturally-minded piece of the series, with hand-sculpted facial features and hands, and slip-trailed streams of tears flowing down the record’s body. All four records share a label design of a fictional “Broken Records” record company, with a bubble-type logo that’s equally influenced by the rubber-hose animation style of the 1950s that loosely inspired the form of Broken Record III, and the typography found in the albums and posters of the west-coast psychedelic rock movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Ate-Track I & II

Ate-Track I, 2024, painted ceramic

Ate-Track II, 2025, woodcut and linocut in artist-built frame

¾ view of Ate-Track I

Rear view of Ate-Track I

Detail view of ceramic 8-track cartridges from Ate-Track I

Detail view of Ate-Track II

Ate-Track I is a ceramic sculpture combining handbuilding, slipcasting, and printmaking techniques, while Ate-Track II is a print that combines woodcut and linocut prints in a panoramic composition. Depicting a rabid anthropomorphised 8-Track player and a multitude of bitten and chewed 8-track tapes, Ate-Track finds its inspiration in my affinity for obscure and obsolete media, and my tendency to consume the same music over and over, stripping every last bit of enjoyment I can get from it before burning out on it.

While Vinyl Records, Cassettes, and CDs have all fallen out of favor at one point or another in the evolution of media consumption, they have all found resurgences in popularity fueled by novelty, fidelity, and accessibility. The lowly Stereo-8 cartridge, better known as the 8-track, has not fared as well, with its temperamentality, relatively poor fidelity, and cost leaving it to be forgotten in the past. Where the other formats at one point fizzled in popularity, the 8-Track fire was snuffed out much quicker and with much more finality. Even prior to their revivals, vinyl records and cassette tapes were canonized into the iconography of ‘retro’ media for the generations that succeeded them. How many people born after the 8-Track’s peak recognize the format at a glance, much less have encountered one in the wild? To me, the Stereo-8 cartridge is the quintessence of obsolescence.

The teeth in both Ate-Track iterations are modeled after my own teeth. I first sculpted the ceramic version by pressing clay in my teeth to create a distorted negative impression from which I could trace an outline, which was then transferred to fresh slabs of clay and hand-carved into the teeth used in Ate-Track I. The teeth in Ate-Track II used the same tracing, transferred to linoleum in order to create a linocut of the player’s snarling maw. The face of the player in both iterations is also shared– The face panel of Ate-Track I was created by carving a woodcut and using it to emboss a slab of clay-essentially relief-printing the clay itself. After the ceramic version was satisfactorily completed, I was able to use the same woodcut alongside the linocut teeth and 8-track cartridges to print Ate-Track II. After much experimentation, the woodgrain of the chassis of Ate-Track I was created through a combination of rolling slabs into sheets of open-grained plywood to emboss fine grain patterns, and dry-brushing shellac as a resist onto the dried clay surface, allowing me to etch away the un-shellacked areas with a damp sponge before firing in order to produce more dramatic and coarser grain patterns. In an effort for maximum realism, all bite marks in the ceramic 8-track cartridges were produced by me actually biting into the ceramic castings while they were still wet, allowing for bite marks that are not only realistic, but match the teeth of the Ate-Track player itself.

The Taper’s Section

The Taper’s Section, 2024—, Installation of 100+ ceramic cassette tapes

Detail shot of a hand-painted cassette

Detail shot of a glazed cassette

Close-up shot of installation

The Taper’s Section is an installation piece consisting of 100 slipcast ceramic cassette tapes– 90 glazed, and 10 painted. Each tape represents a different concert that I’ve attended and recorded for my personal “bootleg” collection. What started as taking clips here and there of my favorite songs, soon became a compulsive quest to archive every instance of live music I experience. In keeping with the larger theme of repetition, the process of producing the tapes consisted of countless hours of production-line style casting, fettling, and refinement of the detail of each individual tape in a mind-numbing and body-aching trial of discipline.

Tame Impala, 2019-08-21, Madison Square Garden

Van Halen, 2015-08-13, Jones Beach

James Taylor, 2024-06-28, Bethel Woods

As each concert is a unique experience, each tape has a distinctly different finish from the next, with each glaze or glaze combination only being used once. The glazing or painting of each tape is meant, in some capacity, to capture the essence of the performance, the performer, or the atmosphere of the concert it represents: Some examples include a tape representing Van Halen’s August 13, 2015 Jones Beach concert, which draws influence from the iconic red, black, and white stripes of Eddie Van Halen’s ‘Frankenstrat’ guitar, a hazy pink tape whose clouded cotton-candy toned glaze is inspired by the pink stage lighting shining through the fog of smoke machines at Tame Impala’s August 21, 2019 show at Madison Square Garden, and a tape representing one of the many James Taylor concerts I’ve been to, glazed to look like patinated and eroded copper in homage to his song, Copperline. The Taper’s Section is intended to exist as a living document of my ongoing concert taping, and additional tapes will be produced and added to future installations of the work for as long as I continue to attend and record additional concerts in the future.

Final Remarks

Reflecting on my project as a whole, I feel that I’ve reaffirmed a lot about my practice and artistic identity. Through the creation of Sound & Vision, I’ve come closer to understanding that the repetition of ideas doesn’t diminish them but rather enhances them; that my unique perspective on things separates my work and ideas from the potentially similar works of others. I’m not quite sure exactly what I’ll take away from this undertaking, but I do know that the struggles I’ve pushed myself through to get to the finish line have ultimately strengthened my connections to my artistic practice and renewed faith in my ability to endure difficulties in both life and art. Just as the various pieces in Sound & Vision are the result of lengthy reflection about my creative identity, I’ll have to take time to process the journey of creating Sound & Vision in order to truly understand the lessons I’ve learned from it. While I still may find myself in creative loops that hinder my creative vision, I am confident that this repetition is only amplifying the message of my pieces. Continuing my artistic journey, I hope to break free of my destructive cycles and enter into more productive positive feedback loops. As this project and my time at Stony Brook both come to an end, I walk away with new perspective on how I operate as an artist that I will continue to use throughout my career as a creative.