Commonly, the more one moves away from a sense of a homeland, the greater the specificity and trace of this absence nags as an unattended inquiry. In contrast to being outside of the United States for much of the formation of this work, and in connection to a mixed-nation ensemble, a book evocatively titled “American Silences” (by Joseph Anthony Ward), featuring the painter Edward Hopper has given this work an added inquiry of the relationship of silence to nationalism, geography and a sense of place. Each nation, and within that, each person holds a different type of silence and listening space; Hopper's scenes of wordless social situations and the (dis)quieted architecture of a Depression era to mid-20th century American landscape hold one resonance and question.
The Art Historian Robert Hughes once remarked of Hopper, "(he) saw that the old frontier had moved inward and now lay within the self, so that the man of action, extroverted and self-naming, was replaced by the solitary watcher." With his insistence of non-action, Hopper is almost an impossibility for a dance reference, but it is in this space of approaching paradoxical bodies that the work Made of silence, air, and glass looks to map a disparate kinetic and visual space. It is a place where materials and bodies are employed in movement and successive stillnesses without a settled sense of equation. Decisively distinct from Hopper, the work unfolds in an assemblage vernacular, mapping a distance to a singular medium and a solely American landscape. Here, in the unease of borderlines and ambiguous places marked by different types of silence, the internationally composed cast shifts through restless questions of human connection, architecture, and context for a body.
As key thematic ingredients, silence, air, and glass, are placed discursively with fragments of common building supplies such as bricks and wood; while plastic and metal tape players take the role of everyday company or a spokesperson to/for a silent body.
Overall, the work enacts a collage sensibility, pieced together from many things, kinetic with some noise on the edges, questioning identity, lacking resolution.
Engaged with inquiries to a silent self within inoperative communities and groups, the work unfolds as a labor for perception, memory and communication. It is made of many things, at the edges, searching for what materials will confide.