HOWARD ORANSKY
What I treasure most about working in the studio is the liberating sense of possibility. Of course, like all artists, I bring a suitcase full of influences and expectations with me to the studio. But this is also mixed with seeing something in my head and the precious luxury of trying to give it a physical presence that will be interesting to me and hopefully to someone else out there as well. I like the way the writer Grace Paley described this creative tension: “Get close to your own voice, and close to the voice of your literary tradition.”
The structure of Claude Lanzmann’s brilliant film, Shoah -- a discontinuous narrative without beginning, middle, or end -- was an inspiration to me. Describing the subtitles that appeared in the film, Lanzmann wrote, “Each of these flashes under our gaze, then goes back to nothingness as soon as it appears.”
I am interested in this idea of vision, the fragment of something that appears before us in the mind’s eye with great power, then disappears. I am interested in this idea of memory, the persistent effort of the imagination in which remnants of images and words are combined and recombined, but never exactly the same way twice. I want to make art that somehow holds this kind of light.
