Three Studies on the Human Form

First Performance

Conrad Harris (violin), Ah Young Hong (voice), Coleman Itzkoff (cello)

28 May 2023, Studio of Christopher Cairns

Havertown, PA.

Program Note

The sculpture of Christopher Cairns conveys something intuitive about our capacity for both violence and pain. It opens the wound from the same old ancestral injury that governs these opposing aspects of our nature.

In these three studies, I focus on other contradictions of the human form— between the perfection of our ideal image and the brittleness of our reality. More specifically, the work is meant to show how we sacrifice both ourselves and our relationships with others in pursuit of perfection through art — analogia teleion, or “perfect ratio.”

It is a story told by artists, comprised of texts by authors millennia apart from one another: Vitruvius (ca. 85 BCE – 15 BCE), Michelangelo (1475 – 1564), Catherine Lacey (b. 1985). It means to pay homage to Cairns’ dedication to the human form and what he has gleaned from his study of our depths. Cairns might agree that the depths of people are almost never surprising, that our entire history examined at any point is sacrificing real humans for made-up ones. Or he might say the opposite, that the mind is endless and that it invented this ideal with a most formidable imagination— so strong it would become the rock upon which we continually bash ourselves.