Liner Notes for Undressing Cover Songs: the Zone of Pure Doubt (2022-present), made in collaboration with Judd Morrissey, is a mixed reality concert and poetic line-crossing ceremony that engages with the cover song as a means of exploring the ways in which personal and political histories are written, re-written, and written over. Exploring the transgender experience of transition and rebirth in relation to both histories of settler-colonialism in the United States and to notions of performance, originality, and self-invention, the work juxtaposes haunting 3D Lidar scans of the DuSable Bridge in downtown Chicago, former site of colonial Fort Dearborn, with the bedazzled home of self-taught artist Loy Bowlin, the self-proclaimed “original rhinestone cowboy,” a persona fashioned after a popular 1975 Glen Campbell cover song.

The performance draws upon the musical tradition of the liner note to piece together an interwoven structure of music, text, and poetic virtual environments. Comprised of custom augmented and virtual reality applications for mobile devices, 3d lidar data scans, original music, writing, and video, the Zone of Pure Doubt is a kaleidoscopic experience that queers narratives of colonization and gender lodged deep within the American imaginary. The event culminates in a line-crossing ceremony based on historical nautical rituals performed by sailors when crossing the equator. The re-imagined ceremony invokes thresholds of gender transition and rebirth as lines of meridian and uses the trope of baptism to honor the taking of a truer name.