Michael Lasater. Kansas City Artists Coalition, Kansas City, MO. Solo exhibition, December 13, 2013 – January 14, 2014.
Sherry Dailey and Tom Tucker Award of Merit in Memory of Shirley Dailey Bennett, 69th Annual Wabash Valley Juried Exhibition, Sheldon Swope Art Museum, Terre Haute, IN, June 29- August 24, 2013.
South Bend Museum of Art, South Bend, IN. Solo exhibition, March 10 - July 8, 2012.
Maquette (2012)
Single channel HD video, stereo.
Digitized archive film, sampled sound.
Sometimes a piece is suggested not by an image or a sound but by an idea. I have for several years played with time; a number of my pieces use time to explore or develop a moment in time; for that matter I believe that in all of time there is only one moment. The composer György Ligeti puts it this way:
I favor musical forms that are less process-like and more object-like. Music as frozen time, as an object in an imaginary space that is evoked in our imagination through music itself. Music as structure that, despite its unfolding in the flux of time, is still synchronically conceivable, simultaneously present in all its moments. To hold on to time, to suspend its disappearance, to confine it in the present moment, this is my primary goal in composition.
Maquette started with a very tight film loop, maybe a hundred frames, of a locomotive drive wheel appropriated from Ruttmann's Berlin: Symphony of a Great City. I wanted to take advantage of the wheel’s implicit metaphorical associations—power, motion, progress, energy—to see if I could produce a composition playing on the notion of suspended time, time confined in a single moment, yet perceived in time. I set the locomotive wheel into layered play against itself, a musical, contrapuntal strategy. Then I saw that I could set it into play against itself yet again – the swirling red color panel, in which time circles a frozen moment, against its black monochrome opposite, in which time is suspended or even perhaps ended. While I was working on Maquette, I came across these words in Faulkner’s "Absalom, Absalom" – living is one constant and perpetual instant.