LandEscape Art Review | Page 186

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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