It was Taylor Swift’s folklore era.  It was Covid.  I was in this mass internet consciousness with everyone, exploring the culture, ideas, politics, experience, remotely, isolated in the country, house sitting for my mom, taking care of pets, working for a likely mentally ill man who ran a tinctures business and ran his family like a cult leader.  I wanted to tell the story of this how it felt to me, without presenting myself as especially significant in any way, and I think I got close to that in this work.

 

Daylight was originally a sound piece I composed during the fall of 2020.  It still is not complete as of 2024.  It is made from 1) a series of personal voice memos I never intended to share and 2) recordings of myself singing several Taylor Swift songs, the most prevalent of which is “Daylight,” from the 2019 album Lover.

 

Over the past three years, the piece morphed from sound to performance as I presented it Icosa Collective for the group performance show called Transmissions (2020).  Following the performance, which was documented by film writer, director, and producer Jeffrey Garcia, the piece morphed again from performance to video.  I spliced sound, performance documentation footage, and iphone videos (most of which are me recording computer and TV screens while watching moves and shows, capturing images and ideas that interest and disturb me) in a rhythm to compose the final visual work.  All sound and video are from a particular period from May 2020-January 2021 in which I experienced the onset of a chronic illness and some bad relationship situations.

 

I made the initial recording in an attempt to reconcile my experience of life and love with Taylor Swift’s.  It is a comparison of manifestations of human experience.  I have emotions related to the comparison.  For example, I feel a sort of desolation and rejection and disgust with myself when I realize the glittering world of romance in Taylor’s songs is nothing like what I’ve experienced in many ways.  This desolation sometimes transforms into resentment, and I feel like I want to attack the world that presents a false vision of white femininity (for sale and consumption) as a dramatic fantasy.  However, I consider my emotional experience to be only a part of the final work, which I see as more of an intellectual exercise than catharsis.  Other times, I am struck but the similarities between my emotional experience and Taylor Swift's, and I think this must be what most people feel when they listen to her music.  This feeling is what makes it popular and universal.  This simultaneous difference and sameness of experience is what fascinates me, and is a big part of what Daylight is about.

 

My first inspiration for the piece was to record the abjection of illness, ugly sexual experiences, loneliness, and isolation, alongside the messages and sounds of Taylor’s songs.  The idea is not that my art and Taylor Swift’s art (my experience and Taylor Swift’s experience) are totally different.  Instead, I am fascinated by the fact that, in some lights, they are very similar. It is my subjective perception of the world and self-ideation that cause me to define myself in alignment with or out of alignment with Taylor Swift.

 

In the song “Daylight,” Taylor contrasts the positive experience of getting to know Joe Alwyn with the experience of a “dark night.”  I take the phrase “dark night” as a reference to the idea of the dark night of the soul, described in the poem of the same name by St. John of the Cross, a 16th century Catholic mystic whose work I have studied extensively.  I’m not Christian, but I find this poem essential to understanding my own suffering as well as others’ suffering.  My sound piece, Daylight, is organized formally into peaks and valleys that indicate moments of desolation and moments of freedom, marked by the repeating of the phrases “daylight” and “dark night,” a structure Taylor’s song also uses.

 

Another important part of this work has been the way I am learning to handle ”experience” as the source material for everything I do artistically.  Experience without judgement.  I respect phenomenology.  The longer I live, observe, and make artwork, following my own observations of life and admissions about what I encounter, the more I feel that messages, ideas, concepts, and particular meanings are not for me.   Ideas enter my work after it has been made.  Daylight is significant to me because it is a sweeping document of a time and place in my life, aestheticized. Sound, performance, and video are sometimes closer to experience than other forms I use regularly, like painting and drawing.  Many of my experiences from this time were screen, sound, or iphone based.