Anchor Zero explores a practice of ‘emptying out’, a kind of wandering and sounding which deeply interiorizes the vocalization and in the same moment supports a heightened sense of external space with an auditory ontology. There is a breathing room, a place where a bamboo frame breathes as we encircle it with the sound of exhalation and inhalation. You are invited to enter the cube and interact from a place of haptic selfless-ness through pulse-taking (sphygmology).

There is a series of three threshold rooms where sound previously recorded in the space is played back into the same space, encircling the area with an elusive adab, or manner of being. The mediation of video is meant as an encouragement to participate and practice, and a pun on the absence of the singer; I think it is you, the one who hears, who is singing.

The zero is a hollow anchor in which breath passes through, but it is at this zero point, that a new ring of pulses, perceived subtly nested in fundamental frequencies, emerge as constituent elements of a meta-sensual language, spoken in the inseparability of a being and its environment. The zero is also a constantly shifting shahed or beloved tone heard in topologized fragments of the avaz. This auditory immersion in the mysteries of the Untranslatable and the sonic utterance (“nam”) is at times disrupted by hyperobjective atmospheric sound.

A parallel dimensionality of the anchor is played out in the visual presence, although hovering at the edge of worlds (Wall, Water, and Woods), in the form of video projections which again refer to the physical threshold of frequencies and their spectra. What we commonly perceive as a body for a voice, becomes voices for a body, or bodies for a voice, and in this disjunction of deed and doer it becomes an anti-choir.

“Anchor Zero took a hold of me and led me through the spiral. Az we moved, we took a breath of [oneness] and the walls resounded. The sounds became friends, emerged as animals, and cried out. We waited, watched, worried, as the soaring above continued de-sacralizing the holy road of the sky. The daughters of the Sun gazed upon birchbark, the black markings shadows of where their eyes once lay. The bright white of the papery bark was a drone: MA, they uttered, and uttered again.

“My pulse fluttered in a panic, if we cannot know anything, how do we receive the embrace of unknowing? The mother’s intuition has many forms, many edges, and many swirling chambers that change their chirality opon obtrusion, entry, movement. Our centers have pantheistic inclinations, and our skin against skin moments monistic.”

Anchor Zero, sound and video installation at the Frye Art Museum
January 10 – February 1, 2015