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I play Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven” on a deserted wilderness beach, which was once a hippy settlement on Vancouver Island in the 1970s. I wanted to combine things that had become overly familiar—sunsets on the beach, depictions of wilderness, and ideas of rebellion and freedom incorporated in the histrionic strains of the song—in such a way that would redeem them. At first the work seems to be in jest, with such an over-the-top combination of sentimentality. Initially stumbling, my playing becomes increasingly confident, waves crash and the sunset deepens behind me, and what was merely humorous in the beginning becomes beautiful.      

The work is an assertion of the commons, of space open to public use. It declares this not only for physical space, but also for the space of culture, by using a song which commodified the utopian ideals of the 1960s.