Statement

Through drawing, painting & mixed media, sculpture & installation, and, last but not least, sound, St Celfer examines our presuppositions underlying perception. St Celfer accepts delusion as an omnipresent part of human adaptation, a way to make sense of our world, one very different from other living things. We may see a well positioned source of water to put out fires (painted red); while, a dog will see a great place to mark its territory (colored the same grey as a telephone pole or tree).  

 

St  Celfer's work examines the intersection between mental health and 'normal' in the mediums of sound and vision. This includes questioning both juxtapositions of chaos & categorization and noise & language thereby rupturing what is considered real and true. 

 

Since 2016 St Celfer has been working on two projects that embrace sensory overload as a means to unlock ways of perceiving a world made narrow by the impositions of power:

Space Between Points™:
St Celfer fights both the tyranny of the square and the seduction of the frame by making images and sounds in dimensions beyond the third.

Visually St Celfer breaks the plane of the wall through the application of marks, though applied to the surface, they inhabit another dimension.

(UPDATE: These drawings were made as a reflection on mental health, what it means to be called 'normal', and the current frenzy over labelling and naming with the self-defeating pitfalls this phenomena creates. When making them I was in a state of delusion believing I could break the wall with my marks.)

Aurally St Celfer breaks the bounds of the cube by launching 16 sound sources into the 8 corners of a square space, thereby creating a sonic tesseract.

The sound source for Space Between Points™, Suites #1-9, overloads our abilities to filter information. As a composer St Celfer makes measureless, asynchronous music with jumps in scale and time. It’s not noise, ambient, or chance music which fall into known structures themselves. To do this St Celfer takes the contemporary fad that’s killing popular music and turns it on its head by crashing autotune software with tasks it cannot handle. It’s an invented means of synthesis rather than the current trend of imitating past modes.

St Celfer’s shows take time to install since adjustments are made in order to make the work fit the space and convincingly transform it. Each installation is unique to the place it lives. This shaman-like activity is open to the public and relates to St Celfer’s alternate career as an Olympic rower and coach and to his personal experience with rhythms of the mind.

Step.4D™:
Transitioning from an in-studio process of the "Suites”, St Celfer's energies have gone into the interface between man and machine. ​He has made an instrument, homemade, or more accurately, “gambiarra,” in Brasilian Portuguese. It mounts to a single mic stand with interconnected gear attached and arranged so that the player can best make music in the moment (as opposed to tracking and then arranging). Sound is amalgamated and congealed by the Step.4D™ into a resolution of crossed and overloaded signals.

​It is a future folk machine made of redundant or repurposed musical parts, capable of the most complex improvised structures​, an instrument based upon ​'​lógica orgânica da favela', a human ​process of city making - ​ reapplied to the structure of an instrument - one that is simultaneously beyond the possibility of human control, like nature​, while bringing enjoyment to people in the form of organization, in this case, music.