Processes of Creation

Processes of Creation

with Steven Breaux, Aja Bulla-Richards, Sky Hoorne and Hester Reeve

Saturday July 16 and Sunday July 17, 2022
9:00 PDT | 12:00 EDT | 17:00 BST  |  18:00 CEST

Two 2-hour sessions

These sessions are live and you will be sent the RECORDING.

Most artists, most artisans – really, anyone who creates – go through some process of envisioning…formulating…gestating…imagining. There are, as well, processes of intending, expressing, embodying, disclosing. And then further, manifesting, revealing, exhibiting. Some of these processes may operate prior to the threshold of conscious awareness. Some of them may move in a grey area. Some may be, or may become, overtly intentional. These various processes – and many others not named – may loop back on one another, interpenetrate one another, fuel or negate one another. For many who create, there is an element of mystery, of uncertainty, a dance of the unexpected and unforeseen.

With four artists over two days, we will explore the dynamic nature of these processes, which have multiple resonances with David Bohm’s implicate and explicate orders, and with his notions of wholeness and fragmentation. Each artist will present and discuss selections of their work. They will then further discuss their work in conversation with the three other artists in the program, before opening their segment to audience comment and participation.

July 16    Steven Breaux

As a painter I have always believed that the paint in a brushstroke is encoded with the mental states of the artist during the process of its making, and that in the analysis of the work of art by a “viewer” these states could be accessed.

I propose that during the creative art-object process a “field” or subtle structure is formed and sustained by the artist’s qualitative states and consciousness – and that this field exists as a hidden aspect of the material art-object. Revealing distinguishing features between a traditional painting and other mediums including digital (algorithmic) work, I propose that this field or subtle structure is dynamic, viable and accessible to the artist and the viewer.

Highlighting my artistic process, exploration and discovery I will focus on how these are influenced by aspects of David Bohm’s ontology.

July 16   Aja Bulla-Richards

By giving form to unseen and latent qualities and processes we open up the possibility of new ways of relating to the world around us and within us. As a designer, making latent natural systems and cycles visible is part of my creative process, one that involves collaborating with these movements in and on the earth.

This way of working is a a response to the urgent environmental crisis we are facing – a crisis that necessitates a shift out of a mechanical worldview that sees nature as resource, and towards an exploration of our participatory relationship with a living world. In this presentation I will outline and illustrate how this process of bringing forth the “implicate” aspects of natural systems works in practice, and how all of us can shift our vision to more fully see “into” the natural world.

July 17     Sky Hoorne

A lens-based, photographic way of perceiving the world has become deeply embedded in, and come to dominate, fundamental aspects of human consciousness. This mode of perception more often than not leads to fragmentation and subtle alienation, which then becomes reflexive in our relationship with the world. Through different mediums I try to counterbalance this photographic and object-oriented “error” by turning to our imaginative potential, which can reveal the world to us in new ways.

Nature – both human-impacted and the wild remnants – is not to be “transcended” and sublimated to mental objects, but rather to be “inscended” – to be stepped into and fully experienced in all of its richness, beauty, ugliness, and power. In this presentation I will illustrate some of these limits on our perception, and how these limits might be opened. The body forms an integral part of this process: the subject matter is not only perceived visually, but also psychologically, emotionally, and by imagining “into” the processes observed.

July 17    Hester Reeve

Through engaging with David Bohm’s understanding of creativity, I have had to question whether I really am creative or not – such questioning opens up a complicated but rich terrain and Bohm’s perspective has confirmed my intuition that the task is as much philosophical as artistic. There is an important line to wonder and wander along in creative unfurling, exercising a balance between being a creative creature in my own life with some sort of experimental outward stretch to enable larger, often incomprehensible processes to fulfil some sort of potential of existence.

I love to think about such things as much as I love the smell of turps in an art studio, but my real excitement is how such mental gymnastics ‘knead’ out the cultural habits and personal assumptions from my brain-body, clearing the way for attunement to fresh possibilities – in how I behave, in the forms I make, or how I might work with others. For this presentation, I will lead with examples from my art practice that engage these various philosophical and artistic interests.

To see the Full Beyond Bohm https://paricenter.com/event/beyond-bohm-2022-2/Program

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The Artists

Steve Breaux, BFA, MFA, Florida State University, is retired (2020) Professor of Visual Arts at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette where he taught Art and the Computer, Conceptual and Formal Development, Advanced Drawing, and 2d. Design. For 25 years he has worked both as a solo artist and in collaboration with his wife and partner, Kathy Reed, in a variety of media including process art, printmaking, painting on silk, computer animation/video, photography, and painting often in combination. He has researched the nature of the art process as it relates to differences between painting and digital (algorithmic) artwork for over 25 years. In 2011, his research led to the ideas and concepts in quantum physics, David Bohm in particular, which helped to shift his private research into a more public arena that included lectures and presentations.

In 2015 Steve was invited to present the research behind his abstract, Waking Space: The Emerging Art Object, Quantum Theory, and Algorithmic Art at the Toward a Science of Consciousness Conference in Helsinki, Finland. The abstract can be found here:

https://stevebreaux-kathyreed.com/pdfs.html

Steve’s work has been accepted regionally, nationally and internationally for inclusion in galleries, museums, catalogues and exhibitions.

https://stevebreaux-kathyreed.com/section/188730.html
https://stevebreaux-kathyreed.com/section/258261-COLLABORATIVE-WORK.html

Aja Bulla-Richards is an architectural and landscape architectural designer, public artist, and educator. She works at the intersection of social, ecological, and conceptual systems and everyday experience. As the Creative Director at Watershed Progressive, Aja is responsible for managing and designing resilient landscape projects and educational programs throughout California. As a Lecturer in the landscape architecture and urbanism graduate program at University of Southern California, she leads design studios that address adapting our constructed world to shifting natural and sociocultural forces. Aja’s ongoing research questions our dominant cultural narratives, and explores multiple forms of knowledge formation and co-creation. Her projects explore how we can re-imagine and transform monofunctional systems into resilient socio-ecological cycles that engage and re-enchant everyday experience, promote alternative cultural practices, and uncover latent ecological processes.

Aja is a contributor to the forthcoming Holoflux:Codex – Form/Movement/Vision inspired by David Bohm (Pari Publishing 2022)

http://www.watershedprogressive.com/
M.S. Architecture, Arid Lands Institute at Woodbury University
M.L.A., University of Virginia, School of Design
M.Arch, University of Virginia, School of Design
B.A., Architecture, University of California at Berkeley

Sky Hoorne holds a MS in Computer Science from Vrije Universiteit Brussel and attended LUCA School of Arts Ghent. She is a graphic artist, creator of comic strips, and a dedicated scholar of the work of David Bohm. Currently she is focused on ceramic sculptures, drawings, paintings, and on making complex issues digestible to a broader, non-academic public.

Rooted in her life philosophy of ‘active context’/’contexting’, Sky attempts to make ‘inscendental’ works of art, in which the viewer is invited to step into the subject by appealing to their primal imagination and subtle participation. This approach involves free play with clichés, perspectives, and polarities. Despite her background in IT, her main interests include psychology, eastern philosophy, science of mind, no-nonsense metaphysics and kiko/qi gong.

Sky is a contributor to the forthcoming Holoflux:Codex – Form/Movement/Vision inspired by David Bohm (Pari Publishing 2022)

https://www.antihype.be/

Hester Reeve is a Reader in Fine Art at Sheffield Hallam University UK. Her practice encompasses live art, drawing, sculpture, poetry, philosophy and ‘dialogue’ (as set out by David Bohm): Art is not viewed straightforwardly as a tool of communication or form of personal expression, but more as a complex kingdom that is continually attempting to establish itself through human thought and action.

Hester’s work has been shown internationally, including at former Randolph Street Gallery Chicago, LIVE Biennale Vancouver, BONE Performance Festival Switzerland, Tate Britain, Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Halle G Vienna and, most recently, Nirox Sculpture Park, South Africa.

Hester is a contributor the forthcoming Holoflux:Codex – Form/Movement/Vision inspired by David Bohm (Pari Publishing 2022)

https://hester-reeve.squarespace.com/
https://www.shu.ac.uk/about-us/our-people/staff-profiles/hester-reeve