Recent work encompasses video harvested from socially collaborative and unscripted performances. Using a multidisciplinary practice of drawing, painting, live-feed projections, performance, video and animation, the work re-inscribes and re-imagines the human figure through various collaborators’ processes of improvisation and facilitated play.

Often, performance projects operate as live public laboratory spaces that create a collaborative space. Performers usually use the installations as a platform for their own work while collectively adapting to new contexts, creating a communal gathering of ideas and metaphors. Each performance project allows for multiple platforms to coexist inside a larger work, with the intent to cultivate various contributions of thinking, sharing, and expressing.

Overall, the work continues to combine various aspects of the live art-making processes, resulting in edited videos (and sometimes paintings or drawings) that collectively reference the labour of making, experimentation, and social improvisation while simultaneously trying to intersectionally acknowledge each performer’s inventive mind, voice, and body. 

Potential Project Options Involving Myself:

My approach to potential research options during the two-week Luminous Bodies Residency involves editing various in-progress video projects, experimenting with video projections, and exploring studio installation options for video projections in edited video projects. I am also considering the use of stop-motion techniques to experiment with the body in the natural environment. Furthermore, I plan to expand my rudimentary skills in animation, Blender, Adobe After Effects, and AI software by potentially integrating these programs into projects.

For over the past 16 months, I have visited my mother twice a week at her care home in the William Whyte neighbourhood of Winnipeg to offer support as she lives with the ongoing progression of dementia. I am not sure how this is going to materialize in the residency work, but I cannot help but feel my mother or at least themes of childhood history and memory loss will end up in the work in some way. Either way, in an indirect way, these themes could become part of my personal emotional mapping for the work being explored at the residency.

Potential Options for My Collaborative Practice:

My research plan also includes the potential for collaborations. I am open to unscripted interactions or facilitated play within the installation of live-feed video projections in the residency studio. This offers a unique opportunity for the residency participants or open studio audience participants to contribute to and shape the direction of my work.

Potential Impact of Residency on My Work:

With the Luminous Bodies Residency again offering an environment that will inspire new explorations and ideas, I look forward to discoveries in my work that will ultimately be integrated into future unscripted performance projects in Winnipeg, New Orleans, Spain and Mexico. As part of the long-term trajectory in my work, I also see the Luminous Bodies Residency outcomes continuing to impact my work at future artist residencies occurring near Malaga, Spain (confirmed for Nov 2024) and potentially in Mérida, Mexico (TBA).

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Derek Brueckner is an artist and university educator at the University of Manitoba 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. His video work has been screened at in-person and online film festivals in Europe, Asia, Canada and United States. Media coverage includes Globe & Mail, Border Crossings, Queens Courier Magazine, and NOLA Defender. Other artist residencies have included spaces in Italy, Spain, Vermont, Brooklyn, and New Orleans. University courses taught include drawing, painting, video, other digital media, and interdisciplinary studio practices.

Participated on conference panels at the College Art Association and Universities Art Association of Canada. Artist talks at the University of Toronto, James Madison University (Harrisonburg, VA), Red Rocks Community College (Denver, CO), 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. Co-hosts and curates an arts radio talk show at CKUW 95.9 FM/University of Winnipeg. Education includes MFA from Hunter College (NYC).