Push'n shove.
En el estudio de Davis Birks - Interview
By Ruben Cham – The Loft Gallery - September 2006
“I can’t be eclectic… I won’t be very happy”
 Rubén Cham: How do you approach the creative process?
Davis Birks: I have approached my art in the same way I would approach a buffet of food...I will certainly put more than one item on my plate and may even try a little bit of everything.
RCh: How is your system of work?
DB: I work on several series at any given time and I think this working process is similar to many contemporary artists who have taken the responsibility of acknowledging the freedom artist have today and incorporating that knowledge into their working systems.
RCh: Tell me about that freedom that you are referring to.
DB: Probably since the 1400`s, art progressed following patterns very much like science, procedures based on set rules, and limits. Since the 60´s, these systems have been dissolving and art has pervasively invaded our social cultures expanding far beyond the previously established boundries. Artists today can pretty much do whatever they want and still call it art.
RCh: Talking about you and your work, how do you exert such freedom?
DB: I like to shift gears between aesthetic, formal and conceptual concerns. Working on different groups at the same time allows me to do this and I find it is a healthy way to work. This method sets up an invigorating work environment where the friction between the different ideas and techniques sets up fresh mental relationships and invariably this leads to new ideas.
RCh: In the conceptual art, then, there is a distance of the scientific method?
DB: Although I invite this heuristic style of search for new ideas, I do however use a traditional kind of scientific methodology based on logic for deeper investigations within each series to explore and document variables.
RCh: There is a remarkable difference in the thematic speech and the technique used in each one of your series. How it is possible to you to approach them in a simultaneous way?
DB: Each series is independent. Each moves along at its own pace, identity and time line. I always reveled against the idea you had to finish one series before you could start another and all this had to somehow fit and be organized on one line. And I never close the door on a series once it is started. For me it does not matter how many years have past since I last worked on a given series; If I have a renewed interest in that group, I will start where I left off.
Ruben Cham
Strawn / Cham Projects – The Loft Gallery
Corona 176 – A, Zona Centro
Phone: 52 [322] 222-63 53 Cel.: 322 135-6303
E-mail: ruben.cham@yahoo.com.mx
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