“My father was a painter and art professor who believed that interpretation was key, leaving much of the meaning deep in his works ambiguous. My mother was a simple Midwestern girl who had strong, definitive opinions on how the world should turn.” So describes Kansas City-based musician and artist Collin Thomas of his parents, the focus of his latest project The Gauze Eyed Gaze Of Bracketed Air. The work originated from with the most difficult of circumstances. As dementia slowly overcame his mother, Thomas’s father fell seriously ill, leaving Thomas not only thrust into the role of primary carer but also having to deal with the loss—both gradual and imminent—of the people he loved most.
Consisting of music, videos, sculpture and photography, The Gauze Eyed Gaze Of Bracketed Air bases itself within those days, where the impossibility of grief meets the reality of illness, both cruel and mundane. “This is, at its core, what it is like to know and love someone with dementia,” Collin Thomas explains. “Repetition. Surprise. Repetition. Shock. Repetition. Fatigue. Endless repetition.”
The main body of the project is formed by what Thomas describes as “an album of music in the form of a book,” which is split into sixteen parts and exceeds four hours of music in total. The immersive result—which owes an equal debt to his father’s ambivalence and his mother’s certitude—isn’t so much an encapsulation of its themes as a direct experience for the audience, demanding patience and effort no matter how difficult any passing moment might be. Listen to ‘The Wrong Banquet’, just one of the mammoth project’s sixteen pieces, below.
