Decanter II: In Defense of Daydreaming
Sound and mixed media, 2023
Braden’s contribution to the thesis exhibition, a sound and mixed media sculpture titled Decanter
II: In Defense of Daydreaming (2023), features a record player spinning slowly while holding a
long, paintbrush-like arm. Copper wires sprout from the end of the arm, and as the record player
spins the wires brush against electrified strings stretched taut between the top and bottom of a
minimalistic pine platform that encases the amalgamated instrument. When the strings are
brushed, a random note fires off from a list of a thousand potential samples and resonates
through the gallery, filling the space with continuous yet erratic swells of sound, some glassy and
expansive, others terse and punctuated, as when a small pebble drops into a bucket of water.
The sound emanated from Braden’s sculpture has the effect of slowing time and perception for
the listener, lending a tense, mysterious air to the exhibition, particularly in its immediate
vicinity. Approaching the source of the mysterious and ambiguous sound, the visitor sees a void
in the scaffolding, an unlabeled record spinning in what seems like perpetual motion. Time is
unmoored from a sense of beginning, middle, and end and instead allowed to flow freely as when
one is daydreaming. As its title suggests, the work is like a decanter for sound: just as wine in a
decanter aerates and matures, increased exposure to the sound over the course of a visit to the
museum creates familiarity with the non-pattern and induces a sensation that the sound is
congealing over time into an omnipresent and enveloping entity.
—Jenny Wu for The Air That Inhabits Catalog, 2023