Donald Bracken
ART Habens
What ' s your point about this ? Can you explain how your work demonstrates communication between two artists ?
When my longtime friend and former art dealer , Denise Minnerly , came to my show and we were discussing the pieces Vestiges of Occupation , she started telling me about her concept for It Takes a Village , a community-based project where she went into homeless shelters , mental institutions , and youth groups and had participants shape from clay their concept of what a home is , with these individual clay houses coming together to form a community in the art installation . I was especially drawn to the concept of having homeless people expressing their idea of a home , which they don ’ t actually have , and I generally found the houses that they created were the most compelling . I thought that if Denise and I combined where we were going with our art , I would add how nature is interconnected with the human community . My idea was to make out of vines a very interconnected structure that had no real beginning or end , a paradoxical structure representing the polarity of nature in that it could be perceived as either possibly malevolent or as a nurturing life force . So the synthesis in this case really encompasses not only the collaboration and communication between two artists , but that of the community participants as well . The piece was first created in 2012 , then was presented in a much different manner in 2014 , and again very differently in 2015 . It is planned to be an ongoing project , going into new communities and having people make houses , and every time it ’ s installed it will be restructured according to the space and community involvement . Our next goal for this community-participation installation is to take it to a housing project gallery space in New York City . In the photo of It Takes a Village , on the left is Earth Variations , and on the right is Au Privave . Denise knows my work well and we chose those pieces because we wanted to have It Takes a Village flanked by work that used the same materials but in a different form . Earth Variations is also an excellent example of semantic restructuration : It was the first large-scale piece I did , on 12 panels , using polymerized clay , a material that has its own predictably unpredictable personality and that , when I use it , I feel like it speaks and collaborates with me on how the work should progress . Earth Variations , created outside in on warm spring nights to the music of Habib Koité , inspired by the budding trees and the swirling river by
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