Termite TV - Life Stories

My name's Garrison B. I'm from Oklahoma originally. Kind of traveled around quite a bit, lived in Vermont during the summers for a few years, actually about eight years. lives in Iowa for four, lived in Spain for a while, lived in Chicago. Actually so I think that was one of the best things I've done is living other places. I think it made me appreciate Oklahoma a lot more, I think a lot of people get bogged down and tends to have a bad rap given the rest of the country but I think anywhere you live, anywhere in the world you have to go to other places to appreciate what you have or where you come from, what you're about, just gives you some good introspective time to think about life. I'm an art student in two-dimensional art, I do a lot of sculpture as well. Lately, I've been trying to come to terms with what direction my art's headed. My work has backgrounds an animist approach, which is pretty much the concept that living things have souls, have energy. And I don't know, I extend that to non-living things as well. but anyway, my work incorporates animal images. I don't know. In a way, trying to get people to look at things that man is not the be-all and end-all on this planet. Like, I think that's kind of problem with a lot of beliefs that man was put here to run things. I like to look at things as more of a symbiotic relationship, just respect of everyone and everything.. WIthin the art world, I think people get really caught up with what's your gender, what's your ethnicity, what's your cultural background, and they tap into that. I like... I wish that that wasn't a focus and people just did the art that they wanna do and whatever that falls into is fine. I've been going off on tangents thinking about how 2000 years from now it's not gonna be southwestern art or European art, it's gonna be earth art. It's gonna be like art from planet earth. In a way, I guess if things get that far then that'll just be an area and that'll be the art from an area and then maybe it won't necessarily have changed it'll just be, it's planet earth art instead of art from the southwest, but, I don't know... But I just like to think of things like that because I don't like society, society's way of labeling or putting people into categories or making people feel that they have to be in categories to define who they are and what their art's about. That can go off into millions of things... I think people don't focus on pertinent issues because it's easier to focus on insignificant things. If you watch the news newscasters talk about what clothes other newscaster Joe is wearing and just useless crap, it'd be nice if they were talking about missile testing on Indian reservations or corporation committing stuff against people as a whole. Unsafe chemicals and products and stuff. Instead it's better to focus on these insignificant things... I don't know, I think it's ridiculous. I'm looking forward to going onto graduate school and developing my ideas. Pushing things further than I've done so far. That's kind of where I've just started to fall into, getting into a solid work ethic and cranking stuff out and testing materials and also my mind and trying not to be defined or define myself. That's about it.