Artist Statement

My practice centers on liberation.

And what is more liberating than breaking the rules?!

While my technical discipline is Jazz and improvisation, my practice spans genre, form, and composition. The common arc, though, in my work centers around concepts of fantastical imaginaries of freedom.

To achieve this I adopt tactics of abstraction, improvisation, and spatial design as deliberate acts of relational tension that investigate agreeableness and subvert policies that reinforce social distance. While sound becomes the access point and primary vessel for art making, the core of this work employs reflection, abstraction, and reconstruction to transmute “white noise” into sound, or “Black Sonic Alchemy”.

This transmutation of identity is informed by the "everyday" instances of intersecting identity and behavior—the moments where we can warp the hierarchical roles of audience, performer, and composer.

In my practice, I recognize that one cannot escape societal constraints without first speaking pointedly within a system of distorted and conflicting shared identities.

To find freedom, I first acknowledge the architecture of my own containment.

Tyler Andrew Lackey, MFA (Ty)