10 In Los Angeles, at my studio, it’s so diverse. I have notebooks full of ideas, and eventually I sift through them and they’ll reduce themselves to less and less, and you get closer to the essence. When it reaches that point, then you know which ideas to move on with. I’m constantly working on diverse projects, but they feel completely interconnected, like a root system that comes back to certain questions. Our lives in the 21st century balance a tenuous line between what is fiction and what is reality. We question our sense of “self” in relation to the landscape and world around us. BB: Before this interview, we only met in the digital world through video calls; now we’re sitting at a table facing each other in “real life.” It’s interesting that you gave our exhibition the title Return to the Real. What does “the real” mean to you? Do you believe that reality is a construction? DA: I think we’re all authors of our own reality. In that sense, I think that reality is a construct. One of the interesting qualities of art is how it has the ability to puncture the surface of what we think we know; it can penetrate the veneer of the everyday. That’s one of the incredible values of art. When you ask this question, you’re questioning the idea of what reality is. Reality is a kind of fiction that each individual authors in a different way, but sometimes a work of art can create a catalyst or a crystallization for an alternative view of this. BB: Do you think that experiencing art can support a “return to the real”? DA: I think the title of the show, Return to the Real, implies the idea that, as individuals, we live in a society that has been accelerating faster and faster, and within that acceleration, our ideas of experience have become flattened. I think we’re reaching a point where there’s a crossroads where we’re always finding ourselves divorced from depth, and we are at times struggling to penetrate the surface. We attempt to discover our grounding and our roots, yet it’s very difficult. A lot of the work I make attempts to create tools to allow this to happen, using artworks as a way to slow down, to decelerate time, and reconnect with the idea of the self and the landscape around us. The installation HOWL is an artwork that I filmed over several years in a very desolate remote landscape. In this desert landscape is a region where the entire economy has been based on drilling for oil, and this drilling has continued since the 1930s. Day and night, these machines frack and hack the landscape, extracting oil. But the work is really about the idea of the individual. The people who appear in the piece have spent their lives there, but they’re struggling to discover what’s next and to find a sense of the future. For me, that idea is very profound: What is the future, and where are we going? I’m interested in the unknown and the unrealized. I’m not attracted to absolutes or to things that are black and white, right or wrong. As a society, we need a space that has abstraction and ambiguity, and culture allows us to have these dreams and visions. BB: Many of your works, including your new installation HOWL, reflect a tension between humanity, nature, and modern life. The people in HOWL seem to be disappointed about a life that could have been different. On the other hand, they are also proud of how they manage their lives in this landscape. We are showing your work Wilderness here at the SCHAUWERK. Can you speak about how you conceived the work during the pandemic? How did your ideas of individuals’ experiences factor in, and why did you choose to layer digitized voices rather than use human voices? DA: The idea of individuality for me is very fascinating. What does it mean to be an individual in society when society is this endless tapestry of connectivity? How do you find a sense of self? In Wilderness, I was looking at this idea of landscape where you have people at the end of the Earth, the edge of a continent where the land stops and the ocean starts, and everyone is pushed up against the horizon. All the people we see in Wilderness are looking out at the horizon watching the setting sun. In Wilderness, this idea of lands’ end becomes a unifying thread. The entire film is shot from late afternoon into night, on a beach where there is a wildly diverse human energy. You find this spectrum of people from young to old, from rich to poor. During the pandemic, I had been thinking about how we have been living in a world that is geographically so diverse and broad, but suddenly we’re confined in one place; you’re where you are, and maybe a ten mile radius is your new reality. In Wilderness, I wanted to use that weakness as a strength. I made this film/artwork Wilderness entirely within a one-mile radius of where I live, where I sleep at night, and I would walk out every evening and film this work. We would find people on the street and the
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