Personal Work is a section dedicated to my own artistic projects past and present.
In December 2021, I released Dematerialize, an album of electronic poetry that I’d been working on for the past several years. The recording was made available in cassette and digital form by New York City tape label Soap Library.
As my fourth solo release, Dematerialize differs from anything else I've done before. First of all, it's credited to both of my artistic personas: Kayla Guthrie and Reliquary V. When I began this project, Reliquary V didn't exist yet. I was performing and releasing music under the name Kayla Guthrie, in a style of experimental electronic song that I'd developed while teaching myself to write music over the past decade. During the same time period that I was performing this music, I was creating text-driven artworks for various galleries in New York, Los Angeles, and elsewhere, along with hybrid writing projects like my artist publications Book of Shadows (based on my solo exhibition at Young Art in Los Angeles in 2012) and Sunsets Working (Bodega, 2015). These disparate activities didn't necessarily cohere, but they did overlap, and so did their audiences. At first, the primary audience for my music was actually the art world rather than the music scene. My debut gig in NYC was performing at an after party for a Michael Krebber opening while I was a gallery intern at Greene Naftali. Years later, the gallery would host the release party for my debut recording Blue (Mixed Media, 2015). In the interim, I built up a tiny following playing locations like the kitchen of Real Fine Arts (as well as a couch-as-conceptual-sculpture on another occasion), a hotel room during the Miami art fairs, and a balcony in Berlin. After releasing another record in 2018 (Falling Star on Wild Flesh Productions) and moving back to Canada in 2019, I reinvented myself as Reliquary V in a purposeful departure from the past. Reliquary V was created as a sonic force first and foremost. Whereas my early music as Kayla Guthrie performed the idea of the musical performer as much as the actual tunes, Reliquary V straightforwardly channels high energy levels meant for movement. The idea for Dematerialize started in 2018 as a simple audiobook, a collection of poems that were shown as text art pieces in galleries between approximately 2012 and 2017. Once I had recorded the readings, though, I realized that I wanted to create a unique sonic landscape for the poems that reflected the intensive musical exploration that I was currently immersed in. During 2019, I made the instrumental parts that would shape the album. One of the last things I did before departing to Canada was handing over the project to Kiri Stensby for mixing.
By 2020, Dematerialize was ready for release, but something didn't feel right. Yes, we were in the middle of "unprecedented times," but I also just wasn't even sure I wanted to release music under the name Kayla Guthrie anymore. The name had already been printed on the cassettes. I waited. The first Reliquary V album, CLAIRVOYANCE (on NYC's AmbrosiA), came out in May 2020. I continued to wait. Eventually, I opened up to the label about my dilemma, and they made the incredibly simple suggestion to use both names on the album. The digital album art could easily be modified. To me, it rang true with the album's role in a transitional artistic moment. Dematerialize, with all of its moving parts, also taught me how to create cohesion between disparate elements of my practice. Though it was finished in fits and starts, it was the result of an overall much more intensive working process and sustained effort than before. It taught me the power of narrative and imagery in my work, which I'd previously been skeptical of. With a sense of completion around this release, I feel inspired to move forward with new artistic approaches. The combination of factors brewed together in the past few years has been highly creative. I look forward to sharing what comes next in 2022!