My recent work engages themes of protean embodiment, and technology. Ongoing concerns regarding the traditional relationship between artist and model have eventually led me to create participatory and collaborative performances where I have integrated various environments, prosthetic surfaces, and live-feed video projections in an attempt to replicate, fragment, or intentionally obscure the body. Distinctions of segregation and segmentation in my work are challenged by linking spaces between the often-isolated forms of practice, production, audience, participants, rehearsal, performance, and painting. Maintaining focus on multi-disciplinary and collaborative endeavors, my work continues to combine the myriad aspects of process, ultimately resulting in paintings that reference back to the labor of making, improvisation and collaboration in order to challenge each painting’s own finality. It is my goal to broaden the representation within my work as a way to challenge those oppressive narrow perspectives of systemic Anglo-colonial hetero-patriarchies. Most importantly, I strive to acknowledge and promote the agency of my collaborators and help empower them as cultural workers with their gifted voices, bodies, and minds.

During the brief two weeks, my plans for the Luminous Bodies Residencywill include potential research options expressing the human body through digital technologies (video/animation), or other time-based disciplines (process based rehearsals with live feed video projections) and/or painting. As the residency progresses it is my hope to re-inscribe and re-imagine the body through potential social interactions and facilitated play. Possible exchanges and experiences progressively occurring at the residency will ultimately influence choices of disciplines, contexts, and methods in working with the body (or bodies).

~~~

Derek Brueckner is an artist and university educator in Winnipeg who has exhibited in Europe, South America and United States. Solo exhibitions and participatory projects include spaces in Brooklyn, Long Island City (Queens, NY), and New Orleans. Media coverage includes Globe & Mail, Border Crossings, Queens Courier Magazine, and NOLA Defender.Panels include College Art Association Conference, and artist talks at the College of the Atlantic (Bar Harbor, ME), School of Fine Arts at the National Academy of Design (NYC), Dominican University (Chicago), and The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Education includes MFA from Hunter College (NYC).