Derek Brueckner is a visual artist and art educator. His most recent work encompasses video harvested from socially collaborative and unscripted performances. Using a multi-disciplinary practice of drawing, painting, live feed projections, performance and video he re-inscribes and re-imagines the human figure through his collaborators’ processes of improvisation and facilitated play.
Artist residencies have included spaces in Italy, Vermont, Brooklyn, New Orleans, and Toronto. Solo exhibitions and participatory projects in the US have been presented at arts spaces in Brooklyn, Queens, and New Orleans. Derek also co-hosts an arts radio talk show on CKUW 95.9 FM at University of Winnipeg. Media coverage of his work includes Globe & Mail, Border Crossings, Queens Courier Magazine, the NOLA Defender and OffBeat Magazine. Awarded grants from Manitoba Arts Council, Winnipeg Arts Council and Vermont Studio Center. Education includes MFA from Hunter College, City University of New York.
Often the unscripted performances become live public laboratory spaces for exploring ideas. Some performers want to utilize the performance and installation or the improvising with a prop as a platform for their own voice. Simultaneously they allow themselves to be adapted into a context that may have ideas and metaphors separate to their own.
The goal for each project is to inspire a multiplicity of platforms that can exist inside a larger work, and overall the ways in which a single work can house so many various contributions of thinking, sharing and expressing.
The work continues to combine various aspects of process, resulting in edited videos (and eventually paintings) that collectively reference back to the labor of making, experimentation, and social improvisation while simultaneously striving to identify and acknowledge each performer’s inventive mind, voice, and body.
The work also continues to engage in themes of protean embodiment and technology where unscripted performances integrate with shifting and overlapping live-feed video projections of the performers. Distinctions of segregation and segmentation in the work are challenged by linking spaces between the often-isolated forms of practice, process, production, documentation, audience, participants, rehearsal and performance.
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