LandE scape
Christopher Reid
CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW
Great again” triggers different emotions depending on whose perspective and memories one takes into account. I am not an advocate of post fact or post reality. I am a scholar and an educator. I teach my students to think critically, to make sound and solid arguments that are supported with evidence and respectively consider opposing viewpoints. I am a researcher who values intellectual rigor supported by peer-reviewed sources. I am also aware that knowledge is something that is constructed. Facts can be framed in particular ways that are not always objective or in ways that take into account multiple perspectives. People experience and remember things differently and have emotional responses to things regardless of how factually sound or real they may be. I think memory and emotion are part of a malleable territory between the real and unreal. Not separate from either but tethered to both. In regards to the balance of representation and abstraction in my work, as I mentioned earlier, my art practice is rooted in the Higure and landscape so those are often points of departure for me. I have found that they are useful in exploring the parameters of identity formation and trying to create a visual Hield that starts to broach subjects of intersectionality, hybridity and Rhizomatic thought. Abstraction creates the ambiguity and openness and liminal spaces that I want my work to have. I think of my work that leans away from representation as being abstract but full of connotations.
Your investigation about the relationship between the tactile feature of textile and the elusive nature of the notion of identity probes the capability of a medium to explore a variety of constructed realites: while questioning about the disconnect between physical experience and the
Ridges
immateriality, you seem to refer to the necessity of going beyond symbolic strategies to examinate the relationship between reality and perception, but that we should focus on the nature of the medium in order to understand the way it offers a translation of reality. Do you agree with this analysis? Moreover, I would take this occasion to ask you if in your opinion, personal experience is absolutely indispensable as part of the creative process? Do you think that a creative process could be disconnected from direct experience?
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