Cornish Playhouse resident artists Ruth Marie Tomlinson, Fritz Rodriguez, John David Tomlinson, and Tania Kupczak deconstruct, catalogue, rebuild, and construct fables of a Sohmer & Co. About the artists...
John David Tomlinson
The prospect of deconstructing a piano has been a perfect mesh of John David Tomlinson’s engineering and musician selves. In the process, he realized certain subsets of co
mponents could be removed intact and the possibilities for what might be constructed with those parts exploded. John, who is a keyboard musician, has always dreamed of being able to bend the pitch of a notes on a piano, much like a petal steel guitar bends notes. John is in the process of trying out that dream with the construction of a reduced piano keyboard with bendable pitch made from the parts of our Sohmer Cupid piano. Ruth Marie Tomlinson
Cataloging as a way of understanding is not new to Ruth Marie Tomlinson. She has taken things apart and numbered them before. It is methodical, slow, and ultimately transformative. A broken object becomes more than a set of classified parts. As she touches each part multiple times, she considers everything about it: shape, color, material, function, history. The process of deconstructing our Sohmer Cupid piano has raised the question for her; What does each piece of a piano know? Tania Kupczak
A visual artist by training, a film professional by trade and a discourse surfer by necessity, Tania is creating a dance-based video projection using the pieces of the piano, including the case. Her focus in this project is the forces that a human body and an instrument exert on each other in uncommon ways. Fritz Rodriguez
As a visual artist and musician Fritz creates systems of interaction that expose frameworks of language and music theory to younger audiences. As part of Re: 88 Fritz is constructing a series of small improvisational machines that will be used to compose a theme for the deconstructed Sohmer piano.
