Commissioned by the Window Gallery, Center for New Music, San Francisco, 2021

I will be discussing this work with Window Gallery curator Bart Hopkin on 6/24/21 at 6:30 PM PST on YouTube Live

This interview and Making Of will be available on its exhibit page after the broadcast date.

It is said that water has the ability to hold our collective memory, a comfort in knowing our connection to each other is already within us. After a year of pandemic lockdown prohibiting access to shared spaces and restricting our physical locations and interactions, it forces us to look with a different perspective at what connects us all. Our points of observation and action have shifted individually and collectively. How can we find comfort in our togetherness, while being separated spatially?

In four continuous movements, Mirror of Light explores the effect of perspective and time on relationship and memory. In this work, sound, water, and light move together, and are seen with different perspectives. Up close and from a distance, our vantage shifts from inside the water to its surface, to envelopes of light collecting and refracting through a curved surface. Water refines and reflects the connections between us; water is a mirror bridging our memories from the individual to the collective.

Building upon my macro-cymatic instruments, which translate sound to movement of water and light, this work spans the range of perspective from what is visible with the naked eye to the microscopic. The sound is composed according to how it moves water and light in the resonances of this particular vessel, and how the sound is amplified and muted by the shape of the glass and water together.

Materials: glass, LED lights, water, electronics
Sound: Electronic organ, synthesizers, voice, crystal bowls, steel drum