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Statement

Artists often discuss the mental, or interior, in art: be it concept, lived experience, orientations or memory. Witnesses of art often accept, into themselves, the external artifacts of these mental acts: be it following material processes, developing formal rules and habituating traditions that we come to call techniques. But poet Leslie Scalapino let’s it all go toward one word: “streams”.

What is this “streams”?

Admittedly, my practice thinks it is always making under the larger umbrella of a philosophical question of “what is art?” and “what is my doing, doing to other’s ability to continue to contemplate that attempt at definition?”.

So it’s always trouble when it comes to artist statements and proposals because administrative bodies often—understandably—stress avoiding getting too philosophical, overly general or unhelpfully abstract. Guidelines always ask for clarity, to remain concise and use common language.

But my practice is only about enduring inside the abstract, as unnecessary and seemingly unjustified as it may be.

My artwork ultimately deals in one’s experience, but it deals with one’s experience of “experiencing experience” via accessing it by thinking about making it into art. So what is experience and what is experiencing that sense of experience, when it's aim has “purpose”, which that purpose is making art?

This leads to the unique quality of my practice, where I am ultimately a time-based artist who uses prior incidents of making in order to try to renew them in time. To try to make my work again and again. Not to make new work. To renew the works already made, not unlike how we all continue to repair, renew and reroute our experiences to meet contemporary experience.

This means that the practice is in a cycle, in a circle which one can say is repetitive, predictable, but, if true enough, ends up highlighting the “modified” that “streams” through always and only living in the present.

I meet my childhood, formative art education, sense of being a parent, being queer, role as art instructor, and artist as an experience to be experienced as to how it, as art, is experienced. I, therefore, give over the worn out holes in my underwear, frozen photos of dead mice and/or the catatonic state of my since passed grandmother (and the failed bravery of a young undergrad art student trying to deal with that) to “stream”.

Days, weeks, months and/or years later, it is experienced for another experience, this time an experience of the present, which presents only the modification of experience, experiencing itself. And in particular, in this case, as it is experienced through art. A complicated and often misunderstood idea of experience and “experiencing experience”.

Internal actions we make—of our lived lives—into subject, theme and metaphor meeting those external actions made further—as art—into another adjacent, asymmetrical experience of life.

But then, it all begins to stream.

Darren Tesar