We continue our Nuit Blanche interviews with contemporary artist, Brad Todd. You can visit his website here.
SHARP OBJEX: What influenced you to become an artist?
Brad Todd: This is one of those questions which is hard to answer as one never really knows what the genesis of how one comes to do what they do, its just such a loaded field - from natural disposition to the nurturing of the familial and social, I can't really say. I guess it was a combination of growing up in a prairie town with very little to do and see culturally, including the base psychological effect of the landscape itself, somewhat barren and endless, that created a desire to enhance that world with acts of the imagination.
SO: What is it that predominantly fuels you to create?
BT: A desire to stave off a feeling that I did not act on issues and emotions that affect my, and by extension i suppose, our lives. That and a kind of dread of giving up and accepting a life of quiet resignation and muteness.
SO: Do you have any mentors?
BT: I do indeed have many, but it is an odd thing, as you get older you begin to lose the romantic edge attached to individual "mentors" and instead tend to venerate certain strains or themes of cultural expression, of which there are numerous influential practitioners attached to. I think it may be a hazard of simply accruing too many names and favorites to ever come up with a list without omitting the other 80 percent that has had an important impact on your practice and life.
SO: What are you trying to say with your art?
BT: I think of my work as having numerous layers and accretions of meaning and they are meant to be read both in a simple and a complex fashion. My practice has ranged over numerous media but probably something that is central to the projects is a sense of fragility and ephemerality coupled with a strong analogy or metaphor, be it oblique or not. The works seem to be tableaus of reflection upon notions of technology and the machinations of its exertions of dominance over both our social and personal psyches'.
SO: Is this your first time at Nuit Blanche or are you a returning artist?
BT: This is the first time I will have shown at Nuit Blanche.
SO: Can you tell us about your featured exhibition, redTV, at Nuit Blanche?
BT: redTV is an installation incorporating a live TV signal, a small Television, custom software and a projected circular video image. The TV signal is fed into a laptop using a analog to digital video converter and is then accessed via the redTV application, using the OpenFrameWorks library for C++ (heroic coding by Elie Zananiri). The image is analyzed and any areas of red are then isolated and tracked in real-time, leaving behind a trail of image outlines which gradually, over the course of several minutes, fade away. In this manner a complex and dense environment of filigreed lines emerges and dies out, tracing and mapping an evolving history of the underlying visual mechanics at play. I have used red as it seems to be the most resonant tele-visual color (and in a neurological sense is associated with caution and even danger), often employed liberally for garish news headlines (think Fox network fascist-hysteric graphics, or "The Colbert Report's" parody of same), "terror" alerts, cartoons, weather graphics and music videos, et al. Another analogy is that of blood, where the stream of images coursing through cables and satellites is seen as a correlative, in some sense, to a bodies circulatory system. The video projection takes the form of a circle to elicit associations of a petri dish, microscope, or planet, heightening the sensation of seeing some sort of biological processes at work as in the early films of Jean Painlevé, or contemporary nano-level imaging.
SO: Why incorporate television into your exhibition?
BT: Because of its "old" media resonance. It is something that almost everyone can identify with, as it has been with us for several generations now and has a grip on the popular imagination like no other simply because of its ubiquity and pervasiveness in our lives, almost from birth. Although we may be the last generation to be in thrall to what has always been a unidirectional communication.
SO: How would you describe your creative process?
BT: Actually it is mostly working at simply coming up with things that interest me, and finding ways to embody them without sacrificing too much along the way in terms of content and ultimate fabrication. It is the old adage about not waiting for inspiration. I am certainly one of those persons who needs to work at creating, rather than wait for good ideas to come floating along (which they do sometimes, although not nearly enough).
SO: What current projects are you working on?
BT: A cluster of works dealing with themes of power, in both literal and figurative senses, as in electricity, energy and illumination but also within the socio-political sphere, hopefully situated in a more inquiring and poetic sense than those terms usually imply.
SO: What advice would you give budding artists?
BT: Do your research. There is a lot of work out there and a deep history of engagement with what has come before and an immersion in what is happening now will give you the tools to speak in a clearer fashion about what is important to you.
SO: What areas do you think are still ripe for exploring within the arts? Is there any new territory?
BT: There are a lot of issues which are daunting still, which as far as we can tell will never be realized or decoded, and those are the base facts of life - on the other hand technology, science and research into the social/health/emotional lives of all beings are providing redefinitions of what is possible in the world, and I have always felt that it is the singular role of creative persons to articulate and translate what those changes are and what they mean to both our interior and social selves.
Tuesday, October 6, 2009 at 12:51PM | 
Reader Comments (7)
Lovely interview with a very interesting artist! Most inspired...
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