Rubber mallets striking a safety rail, a city bus pausing at an intersection, a passenger plane leaving Chicago heading south: Elegy JW observes sounds of daily life, toil, and progress through the otherworldly vantage of a hydrophone submerged within the depths of a placid lagoon. Under the water’s surface, these sonic hallmarks of waking life are transformed into the stuff of dreams… like a familiar book whose words keep falling onto the floor and have begun to sing. They reverberate, merge, and fade—lingering only long enough to be given a second thought before moving on to a place we are not yet invited.

Elegy JW is a participatory performance of reflection. It invites its audience to engage with the boundary between these two worlds (that within the lagoon, and that exterior to the lagoon) by channeling thoughts into hammer strikes on the lagoon’s guard rail, and listening as the sound of these impacts unmoor themselves from time and ripple through the water within unseen waves below. Amidst this percussion, the rumbling of the city passes by in waves of traffic, at the edge of earshot, marking time in a blur of drone and hiss… whispering like a crowd that does not want to be heard.-Reprinted from Radius.