Jill Brody
Art is my way of charting the arc of my days as they unfold into a lifetime—like a book with magic pages that fill themselves only after they have been read.
As a photographer, I fill these pages with visual images made with whatever comes to hand—usually a camera, but not always, and not exclusively. Until now, most of these pages have reflected my interest in looking at communities—most of them tiny, and most of them in the American West—how they are structured, how they function, and what goes into maintaining or destroying them, both externally and internally. I am also interested in the process of listening, and how in our country we seem to have developed a large, collective tin ear, which is not exclusive to the US, but striking because the nature of democracy requires that we learn to listen well in order to remain the kind of nation we imagine ourselves to be.
Recently I have also been captivated by how the world, extra of our interventions and intentions, listens and learns from itself: from the patternings of nature, to the serendipity of happenstance. On these pages visual song cycles are taking shape, some cradled within the writings of poets other than myself, some wordless and on their own, and some within my own words. I have no idea where they are going. In some ways I feel as though I am traveling blind—an interesting condition for a visual artist—the pages filling themselves, as I have said above, somewhat magically. But I am hoping, that like the sparsely populated unpaved roads of the Great Northern Plains that have so completely captured my imagination, that prospects will present themselves, and that I will be led, as I always have been, to someplace wonderful.