KEELY O'BRIEN
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KEELY O'BRIEN

the place we left: creative process

Creative Process:

Because every drawing is custom made in response to each person's memory the creation process is purposefully inefficient and slow moving, with the intention to engage deeply rather than broadly. Participants are invited to choose a place which they would like to have illustrated and respond to a list of nine questions about their memories there. Each answer is then translated by me into a square in a nine paneled drawing. Like a game of telephone, mistranslation, re-imagining, and failure are built into the process as I attempt to draw something I have never seen. I am interested in this inevitable mistranslation as gesture towards the subjectivity and ephemerality of all of our memories within the context of loss and change.

Inspiration:

As an emerging artist attempting to cultivate a community-based arts practice, I have recently come into personal contact with the realities of the housing in crisis in the Lower Mainland, having been evicted from my home and community to make way for development. Inspired by this I am deeply interested in exploring the universal experience of losing a sense of home and belonging. I also recognize parallels in our current situation of isolation and quarantine with so many of us facing experiences of displacement, disorientation, and uprootedness.
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