For me, art is engagement with freedom. It is about being on fire with oneself and one's action in the world. It is joining certain "practical artistic skills" with "existential artistic skills." In creating work, I experience something that feels akin to pregnancy. I sense something happening in me, it grows and I communicate with it and at a certain point I have to let it out into the world. Many times as I have worked with artists or considered my own work, I have thought that the works of art they create are by-products of their active being in the world. For me, and I think for some other artists, engaging in art is a basic need--like nourishment, rest, safety and sex. To deny it is to not pay attention to oneself--to die. It is only an everyday thing insofar as I exist as an artist. I consider working with other artists to be as artistic as making work myself. I also believe that everyday relationships can be artistic. Not artificial, but creative and life affirming and generative. This can come out when producing work with other artists or when putting together an exhibition of other artists' works.
When I put together a show, these ideas play a roll in which works interest me and how I bring artworks together to create an open field of experience--in concept, structure, content, sense, line, color and so forth.
As a curator, I avoid anything didactic. I use the following categories to judge a work: aesthetics, concept, execution and presentation. I am interested in works that could only have been created by the artist and that engage me both aesthetically and existentially. This extends further in curating a themed exhibition in which the presentation of the show is a kind of work in itself. It is a field of experience--visual, aural, sensual, internal--that can bring visitors to new and subtle thoughts, senses and ways seeing and acting in the world.
