VANITY

This piece was written in dialogue with Clara Deike's painting "Shells". It is entitled "Vanity" in reference to a vanity still life – a kind of still life painting that reminds its viewer of the fleeting nature of life and the inevitability of their mortality, often commenting on the worthlessness of material wealth. The title is partly an investigation: the painting is not clearly a vanity still life at all. In fact, it is quite ambiguous in its contours, obscured by its cubist distortion and a simultaneously darker and soft pastel color scheme. Is it empowering femininity? Commenting on its ultimate power in continuity of life? Is the appropriation of a seashell in a home as a decoration or accessory an act of degradation? It is a fascinatingly fleeting piece and an intimidatingly powerful one: depending on how you look at the painting and what your priorities in viewing it are, it always seems to try to run away from you. Things escape their logical place, colors morph into one another, boundaries become obscured... to the point where you kind of can't really tell what objects are actually on display besides the shells... Even the shells themselves eventually start morphing into their twisted surroundings. The painting practically contorts in many of its parameters. Deike plays around with pixellation (softer, larger brushstrokes), shape (lines are more angular and rigid, again, "pixellated"), perspective (the objects in the painting have shadows, yet their spatial relation to one another is quite distorted and disorienting), and color (lots of pastels, and everything falls somewhere towards "cream", whether lighter or darker colors).

In my compositional process I responded to the painting's "restless" pacidity. Something always changes whether you immediately realize it or not, and throughout "Vanity", its sections always exaggerate the real passage of time. Many of the slow changing things actually fluctuate at a much faster pace than it seems, and vice versa. We always get preoccupied with the veneer of what is happening, while in reality the transitions between the piece's elements are the inverse of the immediate impression. I worked with just three sound samples: a rusty swing (just an example of any oscillating or rotating metal mechanism), a sample recording of Lake Erie, and a close mic recording of a snail eating. To me it's three sounds that are inevitably referential to the location that we are gathering to celebrate (Cleveland/the Rust Belt/industrial great lakes locality) and to the subject matter (shells/water/etc). All three of the sounds are periodic, meaning they cycle and repeat. They're basically naturally occurring loops, effortlessly resulting in pulse/rhythm and some kind of pitch content. I play with these loops in simple ways (basic EQ, filtering, reverb), and often meticulously line up their periodicity, basically turning them into one another and often making them sound like the instruments they're interacting with. The piece's components function similarly to the objects in the painting: they slowly move, morph, obscure, concatenate. The "living" objects onstage (instruments and performers) often get trapped in static states, while recorded samples transform and act as almost supernatural shapeshifters, almost acting more "living" than the "living" things. Similarly, while the objects in the painting on the surface may reference life-en-masse and its continuity, the shells don't seem to contain mollusks anymore – they are no longer living, and are now only inanimate fossils that reminds us of both, the fleeting nature of a single life and our attempt at immortality by imbuing various objects with memories and history, as well as life's periodicity, rebirth, and the idea of spirit and soul imbued in inanimate objects.

Live recording from SPACES, Cleveland. 3/14/2026