Poster, ukrwarbody2022
anything and nothing. My main focus during the process is trusting my taste and intuitions, my main question during the process - “what if?” You are a versatile artist and your artistic practice encompasses performance, installation, text, collage, photography and video, to develop such very performative physical pieces. More specifically, we have appreciated the way Witchcrafting conveys both sense of freedom and particular attention to epiphanic details: how do you consider the relationship between the necessity of scheduling the details of your performative gestures and the need of spontaneity? How important is improvisation in your creative process? I don't divide life and art, for me it all is one thing and i’m in it, and i’m it. So whatever i do in life can become art in the future or already is art. Spontaneous decisions and ideas play big part in my creative endeavors. I like when some mistakes happen (not too devastating) but enough to make it interesting and unexpected for me to leave it, enjoy it, learn from it and play along with it. Because mistakes are those markers in time that only could happen there and then with me being involved and fixating those moments. But at the same time i call myself a chameleon - i can adapt to environments and challenges and projects. But when i’m free to do how i like it, then this is when the magic happens hehehe just watch me go and observe the whitchcraft appear. It might start with a poem, then develop into a collage or drawing or installation, then some videos might happen and photographs, then it all can interrelate with one another, then i might want to create a performance or collaborate with another person, and so on. I’m a very curious and not-afraid-to-try-new-things artist. In the past few years I’ve worked with collages, photography, videos, installations, found objects, performances-happenings, poetry and texts, bodies, psychology, philosophy, pain, death, identity, sexuality, femininity and genderness. There are no boundaries for me, at least i think so now. I’m very unpredictable in my art practices and in life. Every project is different and I’m also not the same as I was even yesterday, therefore everything I create is so diverse. By questioning the dichotomy between life and death, as well as the themes of truth and freedom, your artistic production draws from your Soviet origins and artistic philosophy. To quote Mexican artist Gabriel Orozco "artists's role differs depending on which part of the world they’re in", does your artistic research respond to a particular cultural moment? In particular, how does your cultural substratum direct your artistic research? Of course my visions were influenced by my post-soviet surroundings. Although growing up i wasnt happy with it (i was depressed) and tried to escape, during my later year, in my late twenties, i began to incorporate it into my art, creating video collages and GIFs with what i thought is another version of beauty. And through this practice i’ve learned to appreciate my environment and people in it, oh and myself as well. But at the same time i never really fit in in ukraine and its mentality; i had to find ways to explore the world and its cultures. So even though my passport says that i’m ukrainian, i dont ELIS scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land
really consider myself that, i prefer to use the term - multicultural, not belonging to any specific region and i hate borders. I’m an open minded artist and researcher with quite metamodern philosophical views, and most of the time my values werent supported in ukrainian environment, so i struggled a bit. I was one foot in the underground artistic scene, one foot in the polished artworld. Both had an impact on me, but i felt that it was time to move out/on, so i planned to continue my artistic practice somewhere else with more developed and versatile opportunities. The war that russia started, sped up my decision and i left ukraine on the third day of war and on march 1, 2022 i arrived in germany, berlin. It was a dream come true, although during hard and dark times. Then another dream came true - i got offered an art residency to produce anything i want in theater in hamburg. I feel very calm and positive about where i am now and who i am today. Although germany’s fetish with documents and papers and bureaucracy is a bit over the top, other than that i feel like this environment did me good. I’ve learned to listen to my to my body more - and this helps me navigate through life. It is exciting and frightening at the same time to not know what will happen next. Through such evocative and symbolically charged images, that often — as in feel my goosebump and in newest eve — reflect the fusion between human and Nature, your works urge the viewers to investigate and even decrypt such juxtapositions.How would you consider the role of symbols playing within your artistic process? And how important is for you to crete works rich of allegorical qualitites? Sometimes things are not how they seem. sometimes they are exactly what you are looking at. no hidden meanings, but sometimes they are metaphors. one day these things are nothing special, then the next days it’s something you cant live without. sometimes you love it, sometimes you hate it. once upon a time you enjoyed it, then you stopped enjoying it. it brought you happiness but then it became a burden. nothing’s forever. forever doesnt exist. I am a city person, but if i stay for too long in the city it consumes me and overwhelms my mental health, so nature comes in help. And i realized that i get inspired by nature as much as i do by city life. So in my latest projects i explore this relationship bodies/skin have to earth, waters, living creatures. In my latest production performance-happening “feel my goosebumps”, i make the invisible world visually accessible. I bring together myths, facts, poetry, sexuality, music, dance, earthworms, humans, rituals, science, thoughts, to explain in my own way how i see the cyclicity of the world, of life and death, of human nature. I wan to to remind people that earth is important and our bodies need it very much. In general, I am a visual person (i have a bit of an adhd brain) and for me it is so pleasant to strategically put some symbols connecting chaos together in a way. These symbols act like keys that attract attention and help to see a bigger picture, while also playing a good part scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land Special Edition
newest eve 2021
performance-happening during, Naked Forms, festival Prague 2022
being an individual element. As you have remarked in your artist's statement, you art practice is as much therapeutic and personal as it is social, and intended for an attentive modern (at times melancholic) viewer. How important is for you to trigger the viewers' imagination in order to address them to elaborate personal interpretations? In particular, how open would you like your works to be understood? I know that every person has their own view scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land Special Edition alex in the city, digital collage 2022
on life and opinions on things, and art isn't an exception. Audiences should have their own interpretations and i actually prefer to listen to their versions more, than to answer questions like, what i tried to say with this piece?, i’m not so fond of questions like that, because more often than not i have no idea what i’m trying to say that is why i show it, i’m in the process of creation and i have other thoughts in my head. Because of my continuous mood changes i’ve even adapted some of my artworks to this - for example, i created scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW ELIS Land body in the city, 2021, digital photo collage, from series
collages that can be viewed from different sides, so when i get bored, i turn collage upside down and voila - new image, new visions, new mood. I know that my art isnt for a regular viewer, i’m not making commercial art pieces, it’s more intellectual and honest, like a diary. I prefer to stay on the verge of rawness and marginal beauty creating my own dystopian magic. I like when viewers participate in my art by noticing those symbols, deciphering my personal “codes”, putting together mental puzzles and finding themselves in my creations, also producing dialogues and even inspiring them for their own projects and lives. This is why i am a psycho muse ;) although rejections and criticism are much harder to swallow, but not impossible. Imbued with deep personal and psychological narrative drive, your works seem to be inspired by direct experience: how important was for you to create a personal work, about a something that directly touch yourself and that you know a lot about? It just comes naturally, i dont even have to think about it. I follow my instinct, similar to the survival instinct or self-preservation. I understood this after taking a break from art for several years. It was a moment when i though that if i’m not gonna do photography then i wont do art at all (after uni depression kicked in). Especially when i worked for a couple of years in a newspaper as a photo reporter, that totally killed my creative enthusiasm. I wasn't enjoying earning money through photography that wasn’t artistic. So i quit, and went into the restaurant/bar business, i tried waitressing, bartending, managing club, and barista. But after a while it brought scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land Special Edition
ELIS scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land black and white identity performative artist talk, 2021
scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land Special Edition life is not eternal performance 2021
confusion, another depression and illness into my life. I was also struggling with eating disorders and body dysmorphia. And then in 2018 spontaneously collage happened where i started deconstructing images and bodies, and it slowly changed my mentality towards myself. I guess using my own body and my personal life moments in art is kind of therapeutic adventure for me, even if at the moment of creation i dont realize it. But by learning to trust my intuition and processes, i’ve developed a strong desire to share with the world a piece of my vulnerability and intimacy and visual diaries. Before i used art to show emotional instability, low self esteem and things that bother me which i didnt know how to describe with words and didnt have therapist to talk to, so art was the only escape, or death. I overcame many addictions and depressions in the past, and that made me realize how amazing our bodies and minds are. I began to learn psychology, philosophy, anatomy, sciences, to understand the world and myself. I can finally say with confidence that i’m very cool person. These days i continue to use myself in art projects and performances, but i dont play a victim anymore, on a contrary i set an example how a person can be and survive and live and ask questions instead of blindly following the crowd and so called leaders. These days i talk a lot about death and pain, because i think these are quite important themes in every person’s life. And instead of experiencing fear or discomfort towards these ideas, i want to convey harmony and balance through acceptance, and it doesnt mean that i’m not going through troubles myself. I’m learning together with the audience. scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW ELIS Land
It's important to mention that you are a founder and organizer of Kyiv Collage Practice group and . Interdisciplinary collaborations as the one that you have established at Kyiv Collage Practice group and at метаCOLLAж are without any doubt ever growing forces in Contemporary Art: could you tell us something about the collaborative nature of your practice? Can you explain how do some artworks demonstrate communication between artists from different disciplines? Yes i set up a first collage group in kyiv or maybe even ukraine, i don't know. Collage wasn't so popular even few years back. It wasn’t even considered an art form. I thought i was the only one working with collage because nobody seemed to show it. So i began popularizing it, even though some artists laughed at me and viewed my art practice as childish (because collage, they thought, was what kids played with). “kyiv collage practice” group was open to anyone who is interested to try or to learn the art of collaging and to express their ideas in a new way (no payment, just donation). There were educational and theoretical and even philosophical and visual inspirational parts, followed by practical and then discussions. Then метаCOLLAж happened. It was my way of creating one platform in a form of multidisciplinary art-zine dedicated to all kinds of collages (analogue, digital, video, sound, performative, etc) from around the world. These types of activities built confidence in me and taught me communication with different kinds of people and artists. And this led to collaborations with other international and ukrainian artists, because my group and activity attracted some very interesting art practitioners who wanted to produce new artforms and try new ways of thinking (collage thinking). Although i consider myself a loner and i prefer to be left on my own, i understand the importance of collaborative work, because i believe it is exactly when growth and evolution happens. And thanks to these collaborations, i managed to get out of war and find a good place in germany where i can pursue my dreams and new collaborations. (FYI i’m no longer managing or organizing “kyiv collage practice” group, as well as метаCOLLAж; i chose to concentrate on my own practices these days). As the move of Art from traditional gallery spaces, to street and especially to online platforms — as Instagram — increases, how would in your opinion change the relationship with a globalised audience? In the beginning of my art journey i used instagram to show my artworks (collages), and it pushed me to continue doing it because i was getting a lot of likes and encouraging comments. But the more i realised what art means to me and what kind of art thinker i am, and what philosophy i am following, the more i understood that instagram and any other online platform where people dont appreciate intellectual art, and spend 3 seconds on each image, aren’t for my kind of art creations. I deleted all collage artworks from my instagram. Today i use it for visual philosophy and a bit of pr. My relationship with instagram isn’t perfect, i’ve been banned for nudity so many scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land Special Edition
ELIS scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land life is not eternal performance 2021
scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land Special Edition Tverde Tilo, collaboration with brand Pokode02
times, and i think i’ve been in shadow ban for almost two years now. It’s annoying because i believe that male and female nudity should be equal on platforms like instagram. And i keep pushing my luck with, sometimes feminist but fair, photographs and artworks of bodies. But for anyone who obeys the rules of instagram and follows its laws and likes the commercial side of art - instagram can be a perfect place to gather the global audience and earn money or share their creative and other insights. But i’m not one of those people, i’m actually getting tired of this online world that cares so much about likes and comments. I dont consider the online world fake, it’s just one side of the story, it’s part of the real world as well, just a fragment, fraction. So for now i only care about making my instagram an interesting place to practice my visual philosophy, and i fucking love how it’s turning out to be. Here: https://www.instagram.com/elis_prostotak We have really appreciated the multifaceted nature of your artistic research and before leaving this stimulating conversation we would like to thank you for chatting with us and for sharing your thoughts, Elis. What projects are you currently working on, and what are some of the ideas that you hope to explore in the future? At the moment i’m in the middle of rehearsal period and final preparations for the premiere of “feel my goosebumps”. This art project is a reaction to a poem i wrote when I arrived in Germany (from Ukraine) in spring of 2022. It slowly evolutioned into this epic interdisciplinary experimental artistic collaboration (with composer Dong Zhou and choreographer Huen Tin Yeung) focusing mostly on emotional reactions, where our approaches are against form and structure. The artists share intimate moments with the audience. “feel my goosebumps” is a durational 2+ hours long performance-happening that revolves around the idea of cyclicity, seasons, life and death, connection between earth and bodies. It’s an exploration and deconstruction of rituals, like funerals, and myths about underworlds with references to past and present, science and poetry and music and movements, and more. Ps. with real soil and earthworms ;) https://www.lichthoftheater.de/programm/feel-my-goosebumps/ But simultaneously i’m usually participating in some smaller art projects and collaborations, researches and things that attract my attention. Thank you for reading and giving me a chance to tell my story a little bit . https://bio.site/eliselis scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW ELIS Land An interview by Josh Ryder, curator and Melissa C. Hilborn, curator [email protected]
Hello Donna and welcome to LandEscape. Before starting to elaborate about your artistic production and we would like to invite our readers to visit https://www.donnabassin.com in order to get a wide idea about your artistic production, and we would start this interview with a couple of questions about your background. It's important to mention that beyond your work as photo-based artist and filmmaker, you are a clinical psychologist: how do such multifaceted cultural substratum influence your evolution as an artist over the years and direct the trajectory of your current artistic research? Donna Bassin is a photo-based artist, filmmaker, clinical psychologist, professor, and published author who was born in Brooklyn and now living in New Jersey. The death of her younger sister when she was ten years old motivated and shaped her clinical and art practice. Her work on long-term projects responds to distressing aspects of contemporary life, such as the aftermath of September 11, coming home after the war, racism, social injustice, and, most recently, the destruction of the environment. Those pursuits have resulted in two awarding documentaries, two solo museum exhibitions, publications in various art and culture periodicals, public installations, book covers, inclusion in private and museum collections, a billboard in Brooklyn, and participation with other artists in curated group shows. The Afterlife of Dolls, a solo exhibition at the Montclair Art Museum, was featured on PBS' State of the Arts. Tricycle, Fotonostrum, Grazia, and Lens Magazine have published her work. Her photo-based installations have appeared at the Jamestown Arts Center, Smack Mellon, Mills Reservation, Jersey City, and the Montclair Art Museum. She received the 2021 New Jersey Council on the Arts Fellowship in Photography, was honored as a Showcase artist for Art Fair14C in Jersey City, and was recently chosen as one of the top 50 photographers for Critical Mass 2022. Her series, My Own Witness: Rupture and Repair, explores the human desire for reconciliation in the wake of social fractures. It is currently on exhibition at the Passaic Country Arts Center, New Jersey. An interview by Josh Ryder, curator and Melissa C. Hilborn, curator [email protected] Land scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW LandEscape meets Donna Bassin @p1nhole.donnabassin Lives and works in New Jersey, USA
Donna Bassin: The death of my younger sister when I was ten years old, my parents’ grief, my experience as mental health support to first responders and victims' families following 9/11, and my community work with war-torn veterans shaped my clinical and art practice. The many losses and disruptions in my life have given me access to the vulnerability and pain of others, strengthening muscles of compassion and pressing me to create work that contributes even slightly to the repair of our world. I am unearthing the power of grief as an energizer for change. The knowledge that traumatic grief and suffering can be transformed into personal and social change is a thread that runs deep in both my practices as motive and substance. Both my “practices” impact and inform the other. This has resulted in a series of long-term projects responding to the injurious aspects of contemporary life, such as psychic wounds after the war, racial inequality, the crisis of democracy, and, most recently, the destruction of our environment. I have written and published in various psychoanalytic, art, and culture periodicals, directed and produced two feature-length documentaries, created solo exhibits and public installations and participated with other similarly minded artists in curated group shows. Art making - as a form of emotionally rich slow thinking and research has kept me relatively resilient and provided a safe container for my own emotions of grief and despair. For this special edition of LandEscape we have selected Environmental Melancholia, a stimulating series — that our readers have already started to get to know in the introductory pages of this article — that has at once captured our attention for the way it invites the viewers to go beyond aesthetics and explore the interconnectedness of place, scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land Special Edition
Donna Bassin scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land from the Environmental Melancholia series
scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land Special Edition from the Environmental Melancholia series
highlighting at the same time the uniqueness of the viewers' response to the work of art. When walking our readers through the genesis of Environmental Melancholia, would you tell us something about your usual setup and process? Donna Bassin: Environmental Melancholia's origins began during the pandemic's early phases after I closed my studio, interrupting a portrait project, My Own Witness, which started after the 2016 presidential election. I had initiated portrait collaborations with individuals who felt silenced, invisible, and unentitled to their place in this disordered American. I had just begun to find that sweet spot of creative flow with this project, and I was despondent and artistically lost having to end this project prematurely. Being of a certain age, I was warned by friends and family to isolate myself from others. I am a traveler. Traveling allows me to get pleasantly lost as I let everyday ordinariness and the already known disappear, waiting for something new and unexpected to appear. And since travel wasn’t possible, I turned to my archives, trying to find ways to cope with isolation, my disconnection from the outdoors, and the increased disorder of our culture. I spent hours looking through prior work, much of it photographs of nature from places I have been to that resonated with me and offered solace and emotional comfort. (Bhutan, Iceland, Japan, Cape Cod, Namibia, and California, to name a few). Over time I began to see the repetitiveness of compositional elements in my landscapes and began to play with connecting aspects of a component from one location to another. I Donna Bassin scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land
from the Environmental Melancholia series
scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land Special Edition realized there might be some visual comment I could make regarding the similar ground of nature across the artificial and political boundaries of different nations. I played with these links and created imaginary landscapes that disregarded the borders of nations that broke the boundaries between photographed landscapes. I realized that perhaps I had something visual to contribute to the ongoing conversations of many artists and photographers about the environmental crisis. I began from a position of disbelief. How is it that despite the urgency of our environmental crisis, the life-threatening losses, and the ongoing deterioration of our natural world, many of us are apathetic or feel helpless? My creative process and workflow vary with each specific project, but all follow a methodology used by the artist William Kentridge. He views art-making as a slow form of thinking. He draws and erases until he recognizes what emerges as an artistic truth. I have an implicit sense of the subject matter I need to photograph, but rarely are those initial images retained. I review my photographs repeatedly until I find what I am looking for. Often, I only know what I am looking for once I see it in a particular image, and then I instantly recognize it. At that moment, and with an appreciation of its visual truth, I can move forward and photograph in a more precise direction. I work intentionally, allowing the art products to tell me as much as I tell them where I need to go next. I write extensively when working on a project collecting ideas or quotes from my reading to make sense of the meaning of the project. I occasionally look at older and more current notes throughout a project to discover their roots in notes from a prior one. I turn to these notes when I struggle with the 'artist
Donna Bassin scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land from the Environmental Melancholia series
scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land Special Edition from the Environmental Melancholia series
statement.' I only recognize the threads in my work once I look back. But in retrospect, each of my series retains elements from a previous project, either an unresolved aesthetic problem or a return to an aesthetic device that worked. Inspired by the seductive beauty of the Hudson River School painters, the images from the Environmental Melancholia series seem to aim is not to recreating the scene but rather to reflect and learn from its aesthetic. As a visual artist whose work is focussed on real enviromental images, how do you consider the relationship between reality and imagination playing within your process? Moreover, how do you consider the role of memory playing wthin your artistic process? Donna Bassin: You inquire about my work's play of memory, reality, and imagination. Discussing these ideas about the experience and how they play out in my work is only possible by considering their relationship or interaction. My understanding about memory is that it isn’t a fixed thought, although I suppose some memories appear as thought objects that appear and disappear. Instead, memory is dynamic, constantly changing, and is newly constructed over time as we remember and re-member”. I think we remember in fragments and only put these fragments into a story or narrative when we speak them to another and impart an emotional truth. I don’t see reality and imagination as discrete – the awareness has impacted even the world of science that so-called truth is affected by an observer who changes the experience in the act of subjective perception. Donna Bassin scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land
from the Environmental Melancholia series
And although I have begun Environmental Melancholia from components of nature captured by my camera, I have used imagination to frame nature into landscapes. One could say that I have been playing with the boundaries of landscape using past, present, and future, the so-call real or what my camera captured, and the so-called unreal, using imagination and composition to transform aspects of nature creating landscapes that carry comments about our environmental crisis. As you have remarked once, you want viewers to look beyond the beauty and stop and say, “wait, what is happening here?” We have really appreciated the way it stimulates the viewers' parameters and allows an open reading: how important is for you to trigger the spectatorship's imagination in order to elaborate personal meanings? What do you hope your spectatorship will take away from Environmental Melancholia? Donna Bassin: The subject of this project is the impact of the environmental crisis on our psyche. I am simultaneously addressing nature's precariousness and our psychological strategies for managing these heavy losses. I am hoping that viewers will be drawn to look closely at my work -initially seduced by the beauty associated with landscape and the ease of connecting with a familiar photography subject. Then I want them to understand these landscapes, in part, as memorials to wounded and dying environments. Memorials in my mind are spaces where one feels a loss usefully. The photo corners, with their associations with souvenirs of the past, suggest a warning that our unspoiled natural environments might become imaginary and nostalgic without scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land Special Edition
Donna Bassin scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land from the Environmental Melancholia series
from the Environmental Melancholia series
scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land Special Edition from the Environmental Melancholia series
collaborative care. I want the viewer to understand that we hurt ourselves when we damage the earth. As the world falls apart, so will we. The earth is falling apart as we lose fertile land, animals, birds, rivers, trees, and glaciers. I try to keep things from getting lost. I rip natural resources from one location and tape them to another- to repair the damage, restore the losses, and put the land back together. Another interesting project of yours that we would like to introduce to our readers is entitled Precious Scars, a stimulating series that — introducing the viewers to the Japanese art of kintsugi — questions the processes of rupture and repair that occur in every life: how important is for you to create artworks rich of allegorical qualities? Donna Bassin: My work doesn't have allegorical qualities in the sense of the usual definition of allegory when symbolic characters and their activity carry ideas about humanness. However, I agree that I materially act or interact with the photograph to express interior states or illuminate human behavior symbolically. I rely on actions upon the photograph, such as ripping and suturing, which I hope will be viscerally experienced as wounds and scars, not just intellectually understood. I borrowed Kintsugi's Japanese philosophy and craft for I extended its original use to repair broken pottery to describe or metaphorically make visible the injuries we inflict on each other, the fragility and vulnerability of being human, and the persistence of these wounds underneath the surface. But back to your observation, perhaps in the Environmental Melancholia project, where I have created fictionalized versions of landscapes to find essential truths my work scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Donna Bassin Land
from the Environmental Melancholia series
could be seen as allegorical. In fact, all landscape, which is essentially a framing of nature, is allegorical. Your artistic production offers a critical political point of view about a wide range of topical themes, and responds to distressing aspects of contemporary life, including also racism and social injustice. Artists from different art movement and eras — from scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land Special Edition from the Precious Scars series
pioneer Richard Morris, passing through Thomas Light and Andy Goldsworthy, to more recently Kelly Richardson — use to communicate more or less explicit messages in their artworks: as an artist particularly interested in environmental issues, do you think that artists can raise awareness to an evergrowing audience on topical themes that affect our everchanging society? In particular, as an artist how do you consider the role of scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Donna Bassin Land from the Precious Scars series
artists in our globalised and unstable society? Donna Bassin: I stand behind Toni Morrison’s counsel that the artist needs to get to work when the world is disordered. It is not the purpose for all artists but, for me the main motivation. Changes in our socio-political and natural world require that the implicit becomes explicit. Artist can make visible the implicit narratives that shape our scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land Special Edition from the Precious Scars series
consciousness and provide alternatives to the status quo. Imagination is a process of resistance to the status quo It requires imagination to see alternatives to the status quo and the already known, We are a product of our cultural landscape which shapes our experience. Artists not only comment on the culture, but they also contribute to it. With that awareness, I regret not having a richer knowledge of art history Donna Bassin scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land from the Precious Scars series
and predecessors' contributions. I recently learned, for example, that the painter Thomas Morton and the photographer William Henry Jackson were largely responsible for getting congress to designate Yellowstone a national park. You are an established and awarded artist: you were honored as a Showcase artist for Art Fair14C in Jersey City and you scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land Special Edition from the Precious Scars series
recently received the 2021 New Jersey Council on the Arts Fellowship in Photography, and you also received a recognition from Critical Mass as one of the top 50 photographers of 2022. Your art has been showcased on many occasions, including your current work exhibited at the Hunterdon Art Museum curated by Mary Birmingham: how do you consider the nature of your relationship with your audience? More specifically, as the move scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Donna Bassin Land from the Precious Scars series
of Art from traditional gallery spaces, to street and especially to online platforms — as Instagram and Vimeo — increases, how would in your opinion change the relationship with a globalised audience? Donna Bassin: I strongly advocate for increased opportunities for more democratic exposure to artists' contributions and the art experience. I have created art installations in my hometown's frequently used parking lot and a nature scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land Special Edition from the Precious Scars series
reserve. The installation in the community nature reserve was made without permission, and no signage stating who built it or what it was about. It stayed up until the park authorities discovered it. Both these installations brought the possibility of an art experience into the everyday. Online platforms increase art availability to Donna Bassin scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land from the Precious Scars series
those less likely to follow the activities of or frequent galleries. I have been in online shows that have used software to allow the viewer free access to the virtual space- simulating movement through a room of art and enabling one to walk around a 3-dimensional sculpture as if one was physically present. And I am delighted as I see more regional scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land Special Edition from the Precious Scars series
museums curate exhibitions that speak to draw in and involve the neighboring community. On the other hand, digital versions of my art obscure the materiality that speaks more directly to the senses. I am just beginning to play with platforms that allow one to collaborate with artificial intelligence and create digital art. This is just the beginning of a revolution and scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Donna Bassin Land from the Precious Scars series
consciousness change of making and experiencing art. We have really appreciated the multifaceted nature of your artistic research and before leaving this stimulating conversation we would like to thank you for chatting with us and for sharing your thoughts, Donna. What projects are you currently working on, scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land Special Edition from the Precious Scars series