ART Habens
Donald Bracken
exists from that particular perspective . I walked down ninety-one flights of stairs to the lobby once when there was a storm and the elevators weren ’ t running , so when I watched firemen on television valiantly going into the building and finding those stairs , I knew exactly where they were . And when the towers fell I really wanted to do a piece that conveyed my direct experience of having my full sense of safety shattered , so I veiled the image of New York City in a shroud of ash and dust .
However , we don ’ t necessarily gain information firsthand , as with certain societal issues or the horror in the Middle East ; instead , we gather the information from a variety of sources and then we synthesize and evaluate it according to our individual belief system . Certain pieces of mine have definitely been influenced by this type of reprocessing or , to use your term , semantic restructuration , to become visualizations of that synthesis . I ’ m not homeless , poor , or disenfranchised , but not having direct experience doesn ’ t mean I don ’ t understand how it affects society or is part of a chain of events . When I see something that stimulates me , I am seeing something visually that somehow has a connection to thoughts about the world or society , and while I work on the piece it takes on a meaning , and quite often the form or the kinetic connection will have a symbiosis with the thought I ’ m trying to express . In the case of Vestiges of Occupation , I was drawing a large root sitting on top of a destroyed beaver hut , first because of its intrinsic value as an image , but as I drew I began to mentally investigate the connection to the meaning outside of just what I was looking at .
By the way , I think it ' s important to remark that It Takes a Village has been conceived and produced in collaboration with artist and educator Denise Minnerly : I do believe that interdisciplinary collaboration such as the one that you have established together is today an ever growing force in Art and that that most exciting things happen when creative minds from different fields of practice meet and collaborate on a project … could you tell us something about this effective synergy ? The artist Peter Tabor once said that “ collaboration is working together with another to create something as a synthesis of two practices , that alone one could not ?
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