LandEscape 14
James Halvorson
Art Review
beyond the ephemeral nature of the concepts you capture. So I would take this occasion to ask you if in your opinion personal experience is an absolutely indespensable part of a creative process... Do you think that a creative process could be disconnected from direct experience?
Liveliness diffuses any potential activist tone and hopefully invites participation. In my work personal experience is definitely indispensible to the creative output. The art I produce is a reflection of either a personal musing or direct statement I would like to make. The theme of undoing certainties in my work probably comes from my efforts to avoid literalness. Though this is a skeptical strategy of representation, it is in service to removing any undue influence my interperetation of these works would have on another viewer. To the extent that I would want to just be another viewer of the work I'm making, I suppose direct experience could be separated from my creative process. Though, this is pure conjecture since I cannot really be another person. This raises some interesting questions about the direct experience of the viewer. I think even in the works of conceptual artists from the late 1960's to the early 1970's there are traces of the artists' personal experiences in the pure ideas they produced. I would say that the viewer making a sincere effort to engage such works has a substantive experience in grasping art of this nature simply for the lack of any art material. In terms of theory the act of making art, for me, tends to be a process of choosing to what extent I am intentionally leaving my personal experiences in play. I'm inclined to think that absolutes are useful as a tools, but not the best choice as an end in itself. A couple of interesting pieces that have particularly impacted on me and on which I would like to spend some words are
Heretic Song, 9� x 5 1/2� Mixed media collage on book cover, 2014
"Dustbowl Orchard" and "Long Harvest". The multilayered experience suggested by these works is capable of bringing a new level of significance to the usual concept of landscape: from a pictorial viewpoint, they force the viewer into taking a position from different angles, questioning our perception from a perspective aspect. On the other hand, when referring to the relationships