This
is the eleventh painting in the Top 100 2021 series, and perhaps the most striking thus far. The painting captures the concepts I set out for the
series; double portraits; a juxtaposition of the recorder and
the one recorded. Quite often the recorder, so was my preconceived notion, is a Western white middle
aged man and the one recorded a female indigenous singer. This particular coupling is actually the first one, of eleven, when this
is preconceived notion turned out to be true. While the juxtapositions, in no
uncertain terms, comment on the colonial attitude of the object versus
subject history of western culture, I make a point of it to treat both
object and subject with utmost respect. I am equally in awe of the
anthropologists and ethnomusicologists who recorded indigenous cultures,
and of the musicians who were recorded, and, after all, provided the
music that makes up the Top 100 2021. For myself, as the artist, I'm yet
one step further removed, I am the sub-subject in the equation. This
painting features Andrea Quispe Chura, a Q'ero woman who was
photographed by the American musician, photographer, and musicolgist
John Cohen in 1977, and Cohen himself. Both images come from the book:
There is No Eye: John Cohen Photographs. The song the painting
illustrates was also recorded by Cohen in 1977 in Peru. The song was
performed by two Q'eros women, just not (likely) the woman depicted in
the painting, and in Cohen's photograph.
There is No Eye starts with an
anecdote from Cohen's work that really tells a lot about the
significance of the work Cohen (and the 99 others in the series) are
engaged in and my own infatuation with it all: "On the Voyager space
craft is a recording of a young girl singing an Andean huayno. She
singing in Quechua, and her song is included as a sample of the sounds
of our planet." With these paintings I've come to realize how the world
of academia is really a world of respect, equality, and non-bias
compared to the world we experience every day. I'm pleased to have been
invited to show these works, in the Spring of 2022, in a city, Columbus,
Ohio, that was my own city for 17 years until 2011.
