Molly Bradubry
an interview with
Molly Bradbury Hi Molly, welcome to Peripheral ARTeries. I would start this interview with our usual introductory question: what in your opinion defines a work of Art? By the way, how you first became interested in video as a visual medium?
In my opinion, a wide variety of things can be considered art, but to me important art is judged by an experience in relation to the object (or non-object as the case may be). I look for that feeling of being choked up with emotion, unable to explain that feeling to another person through words. An experience that is fully non-verbal, but completely overwhelming.
Molly Bradbury Before getting in the matter of your artistic production, can you tell us about your process and set up for making your artworks? In particular, on what technical aspects do you mainly focus in your work?
The two most important elements for me are time and color. This goes for both the image and the sound. There is an interesting phenomenon that happens when watching/listening to something that has a distorted relationship to time. I starts to feel like time is folding in on itself - both moving and standing still.
Initially I set out to learn the trade of filmmaking, but had sensibilities that were less about storytelling and more about visual experience. I’ve also studied music since childhood, so the ability to compose in time visually came very naturally to me. While working as a film and video projectionist for a museum back in 2001, I made the switch in my own budding practice to shift the focus from narrative to experimental time-based work.
Visually the color palette I use makes use of colors that are impossible in pigment, and only exist in light. In sound I shoot for a balance between acousmatic sound - where the sound comes from a recording and is then manipulated - and electronic sound, which is usually produced from feedback or the signal processing itself.
I would like to ask you something about your background, I've read that you are currently working for your MFA at the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque: how much in your opinion training influences art?
When these elements all start to work together, there is an odd experience of otherness. The competition within the piece between the representational and the side-effect of signal processing causing an unusual tension for the audience. It is important to me to start with audio and visual recordings of real, physical objects. Though the signal processing pulls the piece away from the original source materials, the residue of that original grounds the piece in our experience of the world.
In my graduate school experience there was little training, but a lot of opinions thrown around. Overall I found that pedagogy was sparse, replaced by a seemingly endless critique of whether the “red one” was better than the “blue one”. It is a challenge to maintain a critical distance from the endless opinions of professors and colleagues in order to not have your practice stifled. Clearly, I am not an academic. 94