In trying to learn how to play a new instrument, online video clips of masterful pianists had become one of my beloved resources. Mostly during the after-hours, I sat back in my darkened room and indulged myself in these recordings. A cadence of compulsive gestures and agile tentacles that move from tension to release, and from release back to tension again. And at times, I found myself wondering about the substance of light that radiates from the screen, and the ways in which it casts another image out of me.

Variations on a Theme explores the idea of portraiture in relation to looped musical time and its symbolic accumulation as unrepeatable images formed on the photochemical surface by direct exposure to electronic light.