Donald Bracken ART Habens can exam the leaves’ shape, form, texture, contours, without touching it, from all angles, just as we could if we could freeze time and closely examine the world around us. The falling leaves and light perhaps represent death, but they show it as a transient state, embodying the paradox of life within death, because nothing is truly dead or gone as long as it is in our memory. It’ s in my tradition of magic realism.
Your relationship with the use of materials to create imagery is intrinsically connected to the chance of creating an area of intellectual interplay with the viewers, that are urged to evolve from the condition of a merely passive audience, as in It Takes a Village. In particular, your process of semantic restructuration of a view has reminded me of the ideas behind Thomas Demand’ s works, when he stated that“ nowadays art can no longer rely much on symbolic strategies and has to probe psychological narrative elements within the medium instead.” While conceiving Art could be considered a purely abstract activity, there is always a way of giving it a permanence that goes beyond the intrinsic ephemeral nature of the concepts you explore. So I would take this occasion to ask you if in your opinion personal experience is an absolutely indispensable part of a creative process … Do you think that a creative process could be disconnected from direct experience?
Personal experience can absolutely imperative. The piece Night Music was originally a frozen moment of chaos inspired by Hurricane Sandy. But it became about tripping on a summer night, and by that I don’ t mean drugs but rather a total body and mind experience, about being drawn into the safety of the womb of mother, nature at night. It tries to describe the direct experience of lying in the middle of a tree-lined road still warm from the hot sun of the day and watching the fireflies merge with the stars to a jazz symphony of all the night creatures jamming in intricate patterns of rhythm and sound. And for Heaven and Earth, I had the experience of working in the World Trade Center, staring out the windows, eyeing the clouds and the view that no longer
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