Queen Sleep by Lou Mallozzi and Joseph Clayton Mills

The artists swept the floor of the ESS recording studio, empty save the grand piano in the center of the room. They used the collected dirt, combined with charcoal, graphite, and conte crayon, to make thirty-nine 18-inch square rubbings of the wood floor. Simultaneously, they recorded this two-hour process from close and distant perspectives. The rubbings were photographed, and the resulting images were layered into three 13-image groups in Photoshop, generating the final images for the three screens used in the printing. The recordings were edited and layered in a similar accumulative fashion to distill the movements, gestures, and textures of the original two-hour process into a single 13-minute piece.

Joseph Clayton Mills Is an artist, composer, and performer working at the intersection of language, composition, and archival practice. He is an active participant in Chicago's improvised and experimental music community, where his collaborators have included Adam Sonderberg and Steven Hess (as Haptic), Michael Vallera (as Maar), Noé Cuéllar, Jason Stein, Michael Pisaro, and Olivia Block.