october 12 2019
st andrew's episcopal church
amarillo, tx

[in progress] a collaboration with harlan hodges

(this is a subjective expression of my direct involvement with the work. my perspective is NOT to be confused with the intentions of the project. please visit towardthesouthplains.com to learn how you can experience the work for yourself)

on february 8, 2016 composer harlan hodges who has been like a brother to me was, let's see what the right word is...inspired; invoked; reduced...to write what would become the beginnings of Toward The South Plains after a phone call in which i would reveal that i was making my way back towards the south plains from los angeles after my father had been killed in an act of gun violence the previous afternoon.

over the years the work has widened from focus on this singular circumstance to the all too common occurences of malice of the sort happening every day in our communities.

centered around the cyclical nature of existence, cycles of the moon and of water, stages of grief, the transmigration of the soul, and the constant presence of change in our lives, the work is highly conceptual and multidimensional in scope. In its entirety it contains not only 30 pieces of written music for piano, organ, orchestra, and choir, but field recordings and photographs from across the southwestern united states, sound design,video, and animation. plans for geomapped interactivity are being discussed as well.

composition | the introspectivity of my involvement as a lyricist proved to be personally healing. my self a product of the west texas landscape, i had spent many years trying to just get out. my conclusion has been that without the recognition that the body very much belongs to and is a product of a landscape, the spirit of the land will pull and plague the individual until one discerns in a very visceral way that no matter where one resides, the body we refer to as ourselves is but an aggregate of our past. text has been set throughout the work in both english and latin in order to contrast the subjective and objective scope of this phenomena.

Could it be sacred ground
That we wander
Estranged this soul be bound
Led asunder

A spirit ‘neath is found
Ancient wonder
Possess this sacred ground
We discover

Behold this sacred ground
Tears fall over
Beneath the stones be found
Holy water

Consume us sacred ground
Lest we wander
Eternally resound
Bear within us home
                

“Sacred Ground” © 2019 Harlan Hodges (ASCAP) Lyrics © 2019 Ryan Todd Garza (BMI)

may 01 2019 - july 26 2019
first friday art trail
lubbock, tx

struggling to find a subject in a place with such flat terrain and hard edges as west texas, she offered her beauty not in form but in palette and grade. gestures is a series of photographic abstractions depicting the gradients revealed by the landscape of west texas.

a subtler study in découpé, the abstraction of the sequential moments from a larger experience, extracts sections of landscapes from their context and resequences them as if one were to look at one patch of sky, then another, then another, etc. since the extractions still bear all of the content, what degree of content versus context is necessary to retain meaning across alterations?