Work Samples
Windows, Hinges, Written-Off Friends
2020, 144 x 144 x 72 inches, printed film stills, plywood, nylon rope, pulley system, drywall, acrylic paint
An installation merging geometric abstraction with film-scapes, Windows, Hinges, Written-Off Friends is a series of pentagonal-shaped panels covered with 16mm film stills and found images of select horizon lines. They are tied together to create the net of fragmented platonic solids. A platform-turned-infinity wall frames and re-emphasizes the representation of the horizon line as something and somewhere static—it exists only as a viewpoint, never as a destination or an endpoint. The role of photographed landscapes conflicts with the role of the infinity wall to conceptually explore destinations out of reach.
Windows, Hinges, Written-Off Friends (detail)
2020,144 x 144 x 72 inches, printed film stills, plywood, nylon rope, pulley system, drywall, acrylic paint.
A Primal One, Lost to Narrative (The Dramatic Universe)
2019-2022
Installation View
A Primal One, Lost to Narrative, was an exhibition made from the body of work called (The Dramatic Universe), which merges collage-based works on paper with sculptural objects that muddy the relationship between furniture and pedestal. Affixed to and draped over different objects and surfaces, the collages take on a sculptural component in both their shape and display. The collaged images have been pulled from daily print news, contemporary design magazines, and historical printed material such as primary school books, LIFE Magazine, and more. Beginning as a series of possible storyboards for short films exploring associative editing techniques via montage, the collages took on a new life by examining the role of the frame and its spatial representation via shot size, texture, and pattern, which in turn informed their bespoke display furniture.
Anthony Greaney Gallery, Somerville, MA
Echoes of the Timbaler
2018, approx: 9 x 20 feet, light installation
Echoes of the Timbaler uses theatrical lighting and video projection to cast a “light sculpture.” Installed in the El Bruc Cultural Center, in Spain the red, green and blue lights converge to create a white pattern on the wall in the silhouette of the monument celebrating the regions myth and history. The legend of the young drummer, or timbaler, fills the mountainous region of El Bruc, Spain. A statue in his honor adorns the town center, where, it is told, the lone timbaler’s drumbeats echoed throughout the mountains like the sound of so many muskets to frighten away Napoleon's hoards. Suggesting the timbaler lives on as a saintly apparition, Academy Record’s light installation was installed in a group exhibition organized by Can Serrat Residency with collaborative support from El Bruc citizenry.
For Those Who Song Forgot
2021, TRT: 25:00 minutes, recorded original narrative
For Those Who Song Forgot is a four-part recorded original narrative exploring themes of history, familial legacy, and their impact on memory through objects and places, both real and imagined. Commissioned as a responsive component to the artist David Ross Harper’s The Photographer’s Shadow exhibition at Clough - Hanson Gallery, Rhodes College in Memphis Tennessee. (This sample features Chapter 2.)
Blood of the Sun
2015-16, 11x17x11 feet, cedar wood, bleach, pickling stain, silicone.
Blood of the Sun, which included a cedar-deck like sculpture (called Albatross) and 16mm film (called I Never Knew What It Was to Be Loved), was an installation as elegy or memorial to the lasting impact of the shipbuilding/whaling Industries of colonial New England on its historical landscape. The large cedar platform mimicked the deck of a whaling ship taking up the entire floorspace of the video gallery. The imprint of the ghost ship’s silhouette emerges from the darkened corner of the room and beneath the video leaving a presence that coincides with the minor chord being played on the Hammond B organ swirling throughout the room via surround sound system. Blood of the Sun was included in the 2016 New England Biennial at the deCordova Museum in Lincoln, Massachusetts.
I Never Knew What It Was To Be Loved
2015-16, run time: 2 hours 06 minutes,16mm color stock, digital transfer with sound and loop
I Never Knew What it Was To Be Loved is part of the larger installation Blood of the Sun. The film was projected above a large cedar deck which mimicked the deck of a whaling ship. The gothic sound and imagery was conveyed via the film, the deck and the impression of a spectral ghost ship burnt/stained into the cedar deck itself. Blood of the Sun was included in the 2016 New England Biennial at the deCordova Museum in Lincoln, Massachusetts.
The Spectre: No Jets III, Full of Stars, The Bower
2014, vinyl record, powdered graphite wall drawing, and 16mm film (not pictured in installation view; clip shown in work sample below)
The Spectre was created as a response to Matt Hanner’s audio verite recording No Jets, recorded in Chicago on September 11/12, 2001. Hanner (1971 - 2011) lived below an O’Hare Airport flight path and was able to capture, in the ensuing hours after the cancellation of air travel, the “sound of no jets” on an otherwise busy Illinois air traffic route. The Spectre includes the film The Bower and Hanner’s vinyl record No Jets (packaged by Academy Records) plus a wall drawing made of powdered graphite entitled Full of Stars. Full of Stars was created as a visual abstracted presence to focus on while listening to the heavy sound of absence captured on the No Jets vinyl record. The Bower film was shown in the adjacent black box projection room. All were commissioned and exhibited by curator Anthony Elms for the 2014 Whitney Biennial in New York.
The Bower (The Spectre)
2013-14, run time 3 hours, silent, color 16mm film stock, digital transfer
A component of Academy Records’ project The Spectre, The Bower is a 14-second overhead pan shot on expired 16mm color stock that was then transferred and edited digitally to have a total run time of three hours. The edit repeats the shot exponentially, slowly ramping up speed while repeating the overhead pan until the actual 24 fps shot plays at the half way mark. At that moment the film then reverses its sequence and quickly starts the ramp down in consecutive passes until the three-hour mark. The length of the edit coincided with a soundtrack provided by the artist Matt Hanner’s audio-verite recording of No Jets, a three-hour field recording of the silenced air space in Chicago on 9/11/2001. The Spectre was included for the 2014 Whitney Biennial in New York City.
Skip Softly My Moonbeams
2015, four-color lithograph, 30 x 22 inches, 30-print edition with numbered impressions signed by the artist. Commissioned by and created with Normal Editions Workshop as part of Illinois State University’s Visiting Artist Program.
Skip Softly My Moonbeams is an abstracted composition featuring the silhouette of a New England-style saltbox house backgrounded by a stilted horizon and rising moon composed of Academy Records’ signature geometric patterning. The print is comprised of process cyan and yellow inks as well as a metallic gray ink that reads like the powdered graphite seen in other Academy Records works.
Amplified Heat
2019, 45 minutes, live stereo score & script with 16mm-film projection and printed libretto.
Amplified Heat merges a 16mm-film with a live script reading and features an original score and sound effects. Loosely structured as a series of excursions into real and remembered landscapes, the 45-minute artwork is composed of original and found footage. As a whole, the multi-component Amplified Heat functions like a lyric essay, poetically meditating on themes of nostalgia (for both what is real and imagined); loss of memory (both personal and collective); and decay (of landscapes, civilizations and traditions, as well as humans’ relationships to such grand entities).
What started as three distinct film works developed into a long form non linear essay film featuring a live stereo guitar composition. The film alone is entitled Eternal Circle and consists of reconfigured short form earlier works Dawn Brides Veil, Drowned and We Sit Here Stranded. The stereo score is entitled On Stasis while the untitled libretto includes script, score notes and concept images.
Graphite Cinema
2019, 40 x 66 inches, graphite on gessoed paper
Graphite Cinema developed from the body of work encompassing Amplified Heat. Functioning as a stand alone image, the three-panel drawing was inspired by a single film shot of a lone boat moored at a dock in Italy. The positive and negative space within the composition functions as a storyboard of a DIY Cinemarama via a handheld 16mm camera. The prow of the boat breaking the bottom of the concept drawing could serve as foreground or background within the composition, thus becoming the representation of an object to look past or a portal to pass through. A filmic version of this work is part of a new and in-progress body of work called Blasted Heath, which riffs on H.P. Lovecraft’s short story The Colour Out of Space.
Gilded Splinters
2014, powdered graphite, terra cotta and gold-leaf, installation view
Gilded Splinters was developed in response to the Rockhurst University’s (Kansas City, MO) collection of religious icons and artifacts. The university’s permanent exhibition space was filled with large ornate gilded frames that surround artworks culled of various eras and styles but with a religious tenor. My project, which was shown in the adjacent Greenlease Gallery designated for temporary exhibitions of contemporary art, considered the religious art collection’s various aspects of gilding and other design details and scale within the installation Gilded Splinters. The installation’s layout limited direct movement through the space, forcing the gallery goer to mingle longer within the hundreds of terra cotta gilded splinters rising from the gallery floor. The opposing graphic elements of powdered graphite at each end of the floor pattern were scaled to match the collection gallery’s frames and provide an abstracted presence on which to focus.
Stereo for Mill (Fielding Abstractions)
2013, 02:14” edit, Guitar composition
Composed and drawn while on residency at “Sonic Peripheries” in Gallery Wassermuhle Stuhr-Heiligenrode, Germany. Fielding Abstractions, of which Stereo for Mill is one part, is an additive body of work consisting of a composition for stereo guitar plus drawings made while on site. Field recordings/landscape photographs, operating as concept drawings, were also created leading up to the residency. These preliminary elements were recorded and photographed throughout the greater mid-western US in dialogue with the artist and sound theorist Petra Klusmeyer. Klusmeyer was the organizing host for “Sonic Peripheries”.
Fielding Abstractions
2013, approx: 30 seconds each, two silent 16mm color film loops
Created in collaboration with Petra Klusmeyer
Created on residency with Sonic Peripheries in Gallery Wassermuhle in Stuhr-Heiligenrode, Germany, Fielding Abstractions evolved from a dialogue between Stephen Lacy and sound theorist Petra Klusmeyer in Bremen Germany. The yearlong conversation and exchange involved prompts between the two practitioners and culminated in an exhibition, presentation and performance, which figured into Klusmeyer’s sonic research and scholarship. The exhibition included photographs, field recordings and two film loops featuring binary visualizations of the sonic environment. Both films were shot on location in Heiligenrode while in residency with one loop from each artist and a stereo guitar sound sound piece by Academy Records .
Fielding Abstractions
2012-13, digital photographs and concept images
The photographic contribution to the Fielding Abstractions exhibition described above, this series of photographs explored the connections and conflicts between visual and aural representations of spatial distance.
Mono2 (surf's up)
2020, TRT 3:02 minutes, digital video with stereophonic sound
Mono2 (surf's up) is a video featuring the dual-mono releases of the Beach Boys Summer Days (And Summer Nights!) hit California Girls playing as close to mechanically simultaneously as possible on two Newcomb suitcase record players. The artwork is an homage to Phil Spector and Brian Wilson's use of multi-tracking, tape splicing, and the wall of sound, but it is also presented in a distinctly lo-fi, DIY way to contrast to the original recording’s then-highly polished presentation. Created for the release event of "The World's Worst: A Guide to the Portsmith Sinfonia,” 2020 by Soberscove Press.
DEFEAT! Thus the Magpie, Rider of Leviathan, Herald of Saturn – The 9 Choirs (Leconqueroo III Redux)
2006 - ongoing, TRT: 45 minutes, performance
(Documentation is from a 2016 performance at GRIN Gallery, Providence, RI.)
This performance features nine drummers playing on traditional rock and roll kits. The entire battery of drummers begin in unison and keep the rhythm of the piece consistent until the halfway mark of the composition where a cymbal crash is added on the 1 of the 4/4 rock beat. The additional beat adds a disruptive sonic element to the monotonous beat, shifting the listening experience of the audience and the perceived tempo of the work in total. At 45 minutes, the coterie of drummers end together thus ending the performance. This iteration was originally developed as the third element in a larger body of work entitled Le Conqueroo, first presented at the Hyde Park Art Center in Chicago, Illinois, 2006, and shown every 10 years since.
Forget Me Not
2011, 16mm color film silent loop, three gouache drawings (22 x 30 inches each), hanging lamp with daylight balanced bulb
Forget Me Not is an installation consisting of a 45-second film loop, a hanging lamp with daylight balanced bulb and three framed Gouache drawings. The lamp was filmed on interior Kodak stock and not balanced for color when printed. The daylight color value of the bulb therefore was not true to color in the film print. This results in a much bluer cast to the white point in the film. In the gallery, the lamp was hung directly opposite the projected loop with care to have the relative sizes of the actual lamp and the represented lamp correspond. On the opposite walls, three hand painted gouache drawings feature a shape reminiscent of the throw of light emanating from the actual lamp in the space. The nod to the RGB color spectrum was represented in both the gouache works titles and their corresponding use of red, green and blue to create an implied version of cyan, magenta, and yellow.
Note: sculptures on pedestals are not the work of Stephen Lacy/Academy Records.
HEAD
2013, wood, acrylic paint, lighting gels, performances, installation view
Taking inspiration from music performances on 1960s and 1970s variety shows, HEAD took the gallery space of Los Angeles’ Actual Size and turned it into a make-shift television studio. Project imagery is based on existing Academy Records design motifs and color palettes with background wall of 18% grey. A series of lights with RGB gels directly opposite the platform were used to light the space and the performances. The exhibition ran for six weeks and hosted multiple nights of variety shows. One evening’s variety show was organized by the Actual Size gallery staff and local experimental musicians and performers. Each performer could set up however they wished in the performance space and each night was recorded digitally. The resultant videos were then available via the gallery’s website and on Academy Records’ site.
