Sound was my first medium. We had a piano in our apartment because my mother wanted her kids to learn to play. Someone in our building got rid of one and we took it in. I was an early riser and loved to explore the instrument.
After being told that if I wanted to play at sunrise I needed to be very quiet, I found myself experimenting with just how quiet I could play and still make out the tones. I had no interest in playing anything familiar. I was fascinated by what listening was like at the threshold of audibility — by the way attention changed when sound was almost not there. Looking back, my output may have sounded like Morton Feldman’s music. I wouldn’t hear Feldman for another decade.
That practice — playing so quietly, so privately, at the edge of what could be heard — became foundational. Not because it taught me about music, but because it taught me about attention. I began to recognize the same quality of experience around other objects, other situations: a shift in how things appeared when I stopped trying to grasp them and simply stayed near them.
At school I was identified as a musician. I studied instruments, played in ensembles, composed for orchestras and chamber groups. Eventually I studied composition at the Juilliard School, co-founded a chamber ensemble in New York, and received commissions from symphonies and soloists. But I never abandoned the private practice — the quiet work, eventually joined by electronics and tape, that existed alongside the public career without ever merging with it.
As a teenager I recall writing in notebooks about the complications of collectivizing personal experience. I didn’t have the vocabulary for what I was noticing, but I could feel it: that the experience most worth having was the one that couldn’t be standardized, and that most of what culture offered was standardization dressed as expression.
A lot has happened since then. My work moved from music into visual art, media, installation, and immersive performance. I earned an MFA at Bard College. I founded an academic department at MICA. I was a professor (MICA, Bard, University of Chicago, Parsons) for nineteen years. Since 2009 I have worked collaboratively with artist Lili Maya as Studio Maya+Rouvelle, creating over one hundred works exhibited internationally — at the Palais de Tokyo, the Cooper-Hewitt, the BBC Tectonics Festival, and elsewhere. Our practice integrates live performance, sculpture, cinematic production, and immersive staging.
Through all of it, the question has remained the same one I discovered at the piano before dawn: what happens to attention when the familiar is subtracted? What appears when the noise — not just acoustic noise but the noise of recognition, expectation, and interpretation — is allowed to subside?
I think of my aesthetics as subtractive. Not minimal in the reductive sense, but attentive to what becomes available when less is imposed. The quieter the work, the more it asks of the encounter. The more nuanced the surface, the more it resists the glance and rewards the gaze. What I’ve come to understand is that a work made from this kind of attention can open a similar attention in someone else — not by transmitting a message or producing an effect, but by creating conditions under which something can appear that neither the artist nor the viewer could have predicted.
The details of that appearance can never be fully shared. But the experience of standing in its presence — patient, undefended, almost quiet enough to hear it — is what I make work for.
I write about art, attention, and encounter at Almost Visible on Substack.
current CV (2009-Present) / pre 2009 CV