Beyond Ocularcentric Perception

INTERVIEW

HEARING

BOP How does sound inform your work? How does music relate to your practice?

MCL Sound is a companion. Sound is a catalyst for ideation and clarity. Sound collaborates. Sound is Ancestor. Sound is a portal between the seen and the unseen; between the here and now + what is possible. In one of my earliest works, “Ken’nahsa:ke/Khson:ne: On My Tongue, On My Back (Family Tree)” I collaborated with Tuscarora singer + composer Jennifer Elizabeth Kreisberg on a commissioned work, “Our Relatives” to support the creation of the container of that particular installation. The request was to create a work that cut through the conditioning of colonial and systemic dynamics for any and all who entered the experience of the work. Sound curates who enters and who observes; who learns; who changes, who decides to maintain the status quo.

As a sound artist, I have continued collaborating with Jennifer Kreisberg. She’s a genius; beautifully snarky and wise. I record and use my spoken voice (after writing a script for the work) and Jennifer joins/partners. Sound is a world-builder, it supports and expands meaning-making.

EXTRA SENSORY (6th Sense)

BOP How would you describe the aura of your art?

MCL The energetic field of my work is intergenerational and spatial. It is an aura that intervenes across one’s understanding of histories (personal and systemic). If there is a body that still grieves: the thing, the moment, the loss or absence; if there is an energy that remains obstructed–it is not historical, it is present. A wind that some of us can sense and communicate with. I attempt to make it visible or sensed and collaborate with it. I say yes. One of the most common materials in my work and practice is the sacred and secular use of mourning and of grief–mine and what exists within the environments I find myself in.

BOP Does a spiritual or ancestral influence permeate your work and if so, what does that calling sound/feel like?

MCL Absolutely there are both spiritual and ancestral influences in my work. Sound comes after the feeling. I’m nudged. It’s a persistent tension. My understanding is that all of my work is collaborative with what I call “unfinished business” that I have inherited and may have some opportunity to finish or “close it out” through my practice (for my Ancestors). I then have room to do something else. Freedom. I often receive, through dreaming, the whole of the completed work and then it becomes my task to bring it here, into this world. I often will use sound to assist in this birthing process. For example, I listened to Jessye Norman sing “Were You There,” for over a month while I completed the work “Chopa/Ellegua Till: The Nigger Who Did The Talking (2018).”

TOUCH

BOP  Where do you begin, describe a typical day in the studio including any practices, mantras, meditations, rituals, rest periods, looking, thinking, feeling?  What series of feelings do you experience in the creation of work?  Is there a rhythm to your process and can you describe it?  Do different elements, mediums, and materials say different things to you?  How have you overcome roadblocks with the materials to achieve the result you envisioned?

MCL  I live in an ongoing work, ATNSC: Center for Healing and Creative Leadership, a socially engaged, artist-led, urban retreat, residency, research and exhibition space in the Buckeye-Shaker neighborhood of Cleveland, Ohio. It is sited in a multi-unit residential home that was slated for demolition by a local land bank. Creating an ecosystem of ideation and what the project calls “place reclamation,” supports an immersive engagement in my own studio practice while developing the capabilities for others to experiment. Land, community, and memory are important touch points for me–to deepen my capacity to have experiences that catalyze new works.

A typical day for me begins with stretching, meditation/reflection, and listening. Listening to the birds, observing their and other animals’ engagement with the current environment. Taking in the sunrise. Smelling the air. What is the sky saying in its current configuration? I love working on the porch. One of my rituals comes from my grandfather, Paul O. Murphy, who would have a coffee with a newspaper while listening to jazz every morning. For me, it’s coffee and checking the headlines and what the weather will be via my smartphone.

There is a constant meditation that is useful for me as a human being and as an artist. It’s in the stillness that I come into contact with the feeling of creation or the need for repetitive movement in an environment (a walk; going to the water; a drive while playing sound as a “thought partner”) that helps me in engaging with my practice–is part of the practice. There is a cycle of sensations that I experience that support me in becoming aware; mobilizing my energy as I connect with the aura of creating/working for myself; that is, beginning my part in Ancestral collaboration. There’s a series of activations that occur internally. I’m a Gestalt practitioner, so what I’m referring to here is the Gestalt concept of the “cycle of experience,” we all go through it and use it–we don’t all track ourselves in this cycle. It is necessary for me as an artist. It’s critical for my well-being as a person living in a body at the edge of so many marginalized social group identities. I feel deeply. I need to feel deeply. ALL of it is useful to me–the sadness, the contentment, the joy, the anger, the grief, rage–love. And yes, I pause when needed. I take naps.

There is a rhythm (back to the cycle of experience). There is a nudging sensation and I become aware that there is some work to do. It may take a while or quickly in terms of how my energy needs to move into a mobilized state. I used to question it, but it is different based on what the work is.

Again, this is from my grandfather, I can’t begin a new work without starting with materials that have been discarded or unwanted by the environment. This is interesting to me on many different levels. My “grandad” had a woodshop in the basement of his home (he studied industrial arts at Kent State University after WWII) so some of my early experiences in making objects was with him. He bought me a toolbox and would give me wood scraps to make things out of it. So to be discarded means to begin. I also like to gather objects together, altar making in both private and public spaces supports calling in different materials and yes, they speak AND they say something different when they come together. That’s the work of translating “spirit” to the here and now. This is not easy to do, the inner work, the excavation, the research, the digesting, the problem-solving happens first, and then the laboring helps catalyze new meanings and new feelings as I work. There’s no overcoming, just moving through the experience–being alive.

MEMORY

BOP What is your earliest sonic memory?

MCL I recently learned the music of Ahmad Jamal is one of my earliest sonic memories. I have my grandfather’s vinyl collection and it will be digitized so that artists can come to ATNSC and make beats with it or sample it for some other kind of sound art.

As I began listening to the collection, Nine Crates, the song “Night Mist Blues” got my attention and raised my awareness. While my grandfather spoke of Duke Ellington, Count Basie and Ella Fitzgerald as his favorites, Ahmad’s work evoked memory. Living with my grandfather, the smells of sawdust and pipe tobacco.

The other early “sonic memory” that is most comforting and generative for me is the sound of my neighborhood, the energies of a community. In the sound work, “It Will Be Moved Again,” I record my current neighborhood, Buckeye-Shaker. Where I live now reminds me of my childhood neighborhood, Glenville. The ambient sounds of: children playing; of old friends connecting with each other; of music coming from passing cars; dogs barking; sirens–you know, the urban environment. A city.

BOP What are the themes in your work and how are they informed by memory?

MCL My work often, thematically, looks at the impact of various systems as a structural interruption to the natural processes of being human and the inherited behaviors we carry/need to let go of in order to become human again. So I often use the family system as both microcosm and microscope to investigate and imagine how to heal the damages caused by the interruptions of: displacement; theft of lands and peoples; colonial fugitivities (as opposed to migrations); racialization, settler violences and binary worldviews. It’s ALL informed by memory–mine and my Ancestors; meaning storytelling and the narratives of omission that swirl within our families and communities–the objects removed and discarded through ongoing occupations and erasures.

TASTE

BOP What informs/inspires your practice?

MCL What inspires my practice is the fact that I come from several generations of artists who were not able to have a practice. What informs my practice is the necessity to incorporate a materiality of becoming that brings their practice into being; in a collaborative way with my own. I made a work, a series of prints on handmade paper that resurrects the story of relatives who were the first people of color to live in the suburb of Cleveland Heights, Alfred and Mayme Copes, (í:se) Be Our Guest/Stolen, (2022). Alfred built houses for a living and built their home. Mayme hosted others there. Place informs my practice; being here, now in the world makes it all site-specific. How do we make home for ourselves after displacement and removals? How do we engage in radical hospitality as balm and activism?

I make an effort to be in alignment with the world by using what has been “discarded” by false histories. Humor informs my practice–it is a healing medium and material. My lived experience informs my practice. I didn’t go to art school, my development as an artist is rooted in developing myself as an applied behavioral scientist; that is, studying human systems. This has been a core and an ongoing experiment–integrating systems thinking into my art practice. Socially engaged art often falls flat where a lived practice requires a conscious awareness of one’s interconnectivity with all things seen and unseen and at every level of and within all human systems.

BOP Describe the style of your work as it relates to music. For example, are you a Blues painter, or jazz painter?

MCL A dear friend, Rachel Elizabeth Harding, who is a scholar-practitioner of Afro-Indigenous spiritual traditions, shared once that an elder mentioned the necessity of listening to music that carries “ashe,” or for me, music that holds the energies of creation. My work carries past, present and future–what we know and don’t know is possible. I would describe myself as a ritual artist. I like to create ceremonial situations to encourage new meaning-making. Not a blues painter, but a music of the Americas practitioner–North and South, the music that is indigenous and the music that has synchronized with the land–jazz, spirituals, samba, afro-latin jazz, zouk, etc.

BOP What happens in between the making?

MCL In between the making? I experience. I live. I grieve. I make meanings for these new worlds we find ourselves in.