Inherent in Dorian Wood’s latest release EXCESIVA is a challenge: How do our words hold up to our actions?

A watchful stillness is Wood’s medium — the haunting quality of wind rushing through an emptied milk jar placed near a dilapidated old amphitheater on the grounds of the MacDowell Artist's Residency in Peterborough, New Hampshire where Wood was a resident in the fall of 2022. In 2020, the prestigious residency had announced it would drop the word “colony” from its name, only to then publicly honor Thanksgiving as a day of celebration during the time of Wood’s stay. Struck by the contradiction in these two gestures, Wood set out on Thanksgiving day with a microphone and an empty milk jar, symbol of a 1950s American Dream, and captured the afternoon unfolding around its borders. Bird calls echo against the glass, filtered through the wind, which carries also the distant sounds of hunters’ guns, and the rustling of oaks at the base of Mount Monadnock. 

Over the course of the piece’s 44 minutes, the atmosphere builds and dissipates, like slow gasps and exhalations urging the listener to remain present with a changing landscape. There is an eerie chill to its languor, a sense of wandering through a winter storm alone. But through placing us en media res, Wood also invites a meditation on land, the beings and objects that occupy it, and the oppositions it holds in conversation, audible only if we still ourselves long enough to hear them.