Main Street Lament

Main Street Lament

2018 O. Henry Museum

Broken instruments, motors, electronics, O. Henry’s Main Street composition, field recordings of Interstate 35

Drawing from O. Henry’s original, handwritten sheet music, on view in the museum, this work utilizes broken instruments reanimated by motors, field recordings of Austin traffic, and latent, resonant artifacts to transform the museum, an 1880’s era Queen Anne cottage, into a living, breathing musical instrument. Main Street Lament treats O. Henry’s original theme as a rickety dirge to examine I-35 — Austin’s contemporary main street — as an important shipping artery, as a treacherous motorway, and as a destructive force of redlining and segregation.