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OUT OF PRINT
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In Swann
Remained Silent: Forty Silences in Swann’s Way, I draw on the first
volume of Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past—in the classic translation
by C. K. Scott Moncrieff—and extract from it forty distinct moments of
silence. Proust’s words, as translated by Moncrieff, are refashioned into
stencils, the letters cut from a series of cards that are held up against
the backdrop of my own surroundings and photographed. With this simple
gesture, fragments of Proust’s text are severed from their original
context, given new resonance, and transformed into new lacunae. The
specific, nuanced silences described by Proust are layered with others—the
silence of a photograph or a memory, and the stillness that accompanies
reading, contemplation, and reverie. My hope is that, in this act of
imaginative auditory superimposition, these mute images of empty words
might nonetheless convey a faint, elusive music.
-Joseph Clayton Mills
This limited-edition release comprises forty photographs,
which are printed on 5 x 7 matte photographic paper and presented in a
cardboard box. The photographs are accompanied by a brief essay by sound
artist Lou Mallozzi, along with additional
information on the release.
This is Suppedaneum no. 23.
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Proust’s silences are
all after and never before. Unfolding from the labyrinths of the author’s
uncompromisingly luxurious sentences, they are melancholy silences that
withhold any promise of renewal or resurgence. Joseph Clayton Mills’s
silences, though born of Proust, born of melancholy, born of after, are inverted silences. They open back out into the
world of potentialities – they hold us at the moment of just
about to.
–Lou Mallozzi
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Joseph Clayton Mills Is an artist, composer, and
performer working at the intersection of language, composition, and
archival practice. A former Chicagoan, he remains an active participant in
the improvised and experimental music community there, where his
collaborators have included Adam Sonderberg and
Steven Hess (as Haptic), Michael Vallera (as Maar), Noé
Cuéllar (as Partial), Jason Stein, Michael Pisaro, and Olivia Block, among many others. His
recordings have appeared on numerous labels, including Another Timbre, FSS,
and Entr’acte. In 2013, in collaboration with Noé
Cuéllar, he launched the label Suppedaneum to
focus on releasing scores and their realizations. He has received
commissions and grants from the Chicago Film Archive, Black Cinema House
(Rebuild Foundation), the Illinois Arts Council, the Experimental Sound
Studio, and, in 2016, was artist in residence at the Sonic Arts Research
Unit at Oxford Brookes University, UK.
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