Hello and welcome to the 48th 3 Art Questions With Jackson interview! This time I interviewed the fascinating and multi-talented Dao Strom. Her show at Catherine G. Murphy Gallery really stuck with me and I am so pleased that she agreed to do this. Her answers provide a lot of insight into her work and process and I think you will enjoy them. Thank you for reading! (All images courtesy of the artist / Instagram: @herandthesea)
Jackson: What first inspired you to be an artist? Were you motivated by a specific experience?
Dao: There is no specific experience that awoke me to the role of art in my life - creativity has always been a huge part of my being ever since I was a child. Perhaps it helped that I had a mother who was a writer and so I was encouraged by her - to a degree - to write and draw when I was young. Writing, language, stories, the imagination were natural refuges for me, and I wrote stories and drew pictures and made up worlds in my head all through my youth. But instead of studying writing when I went to college, I decided to study filmmaking; this is where the use of the camera and visual techniques first became a more intentional field for me, perhaps. As for music, I had no notions of myself as a musician until I began exploring music in my early twenties. I would say the music came to me - a box of cassettes (back when this was the listening format, yes) of traditional folk musicians found on a sidewalk in New York City one afternoon, played a part in opening a door onto a genre of music that led to me wanting to learn how to sing and play guitar myself. My journey toward and through those mediums of "voice" I inhabit has felt, for me, like a very organic, winding path.
Jackson: I really like your poetry and music but I particularly love your video art. Do you have a preference? Are the video pieces more difficult to realize?
Dao: I have individual relationships with all of these mediums, and yet, and also, I feel that it is important for me to recognize how the hybrid space/forms where these three voices come together is itself unique and where the endeavor of my art finds its biggest tensions. At least for myself the melding of mediums is maybe also a re-pairing - an urge to reconnect - disparate, fragmented spheres of myself. I think it is the same 'voice' that manifests through each medium, that is not content to just sound through one format or conduit alone. That all can carry through without relying on a body, on concrete materials, etc, to be an experience - the way a song can be sung/played by anyone who cares to inhabit it; a song is such an amorphous, wondrous vessel. As for the video pieces: since the imagery often involves myself playing a part or performing some action, I have collaborated with others behind the camera, and also in the editing process at times. My collaborators, however, have (so far) been only a couple people who are quite close to me - friends, loved ones. Some of the video work also involves found imagery, whether personal or documentary. The video-making process, although physical and involving collaboration, is still quite intimate and interior, I don't go into it with planned ideas for what to shoot, for instance, but more just a few rough ideas, then we go looking for the right settings and objects, and see what unfolds. A lot is created later in the editing process.
Jackson: If you could meet any artist living or dead, who would it be and why?
Dao: Theresa Hak Kyung Cha - but maybe only to witness a performance by her or hear her voice, embodied. I would not myself know what to say to her and would be happy to just hear/allow her work to speak for itself.
