Är tēst Magazine - Issue 1. Patricia Brace - Är tēst Magazine is a fine art and photography magazine that tells artist's stories in their words, as they see the world.
Är tēst Magazine is a fine art and photography magazine that tells artist's stories in their words, as they see the world.
-Words by Patricia Brace
-Photography by Damon May
-Design and Layout Damon May
-Art Direction Damon May
Growing up in rural Maine my Mom drove me 45 minutes to ballet class multiple times a week starting from the age of 5. My ballet instructor taught a strict Russian technique and I began to flourish in the class. By the time I turned 10 my Mom got a job as the director of an adoption agency so we moved 3 hours South. While looking forward to leaving the small town where we lived, I was not happy about leaving my dance studio that by this time had become a huge part of my identity.
In Portland Maine I joined the local studio but was not as good as the other girls my age. It seemed in Southern Maine the classes were taught at a faster pace and point and pirouettes were done at a much younger age. I stuck to the classes throughout middle school, but by the time I was 13 and entering high school I had to choose between sports and ballet. The choice was fairly clear, as I started to fall further and further behind in ballet, but the loss of something that I had practiced for 8 years was hard.
Over the past 20 years I have gone on to become a professional artist and teacher and I’m very passionate about my career. Looking back on my life there are a few things that I regret, and quitting ballet is one of them. In the fall of 2016 I have 3 forthcoming exhibitions that I have decided to focus exclusively on using the medium of ballet to talk about my relationship to failure, abandonment and love. In order to do this I have started taking bi-weekly ballet classes and am exclusively making dance performances in my studio. I am interested in the contemporary art discourse between ballet and performance art and the role that documentation, collaboration, and installation will take in my conflation of these two mediums.
Since 2009 I’ve had a difficult relationship with my father. In that time he sold a family property that was important to me without my knowledge. Before the sale was finalized I went to the property and took what I could from the cottage, which mostly consisted of the two broken mirrors seen here in the photo. Upon entering the cottage I thought there were two crescent mirrors displayed above the window, but when I took them down I realized they were two halves to a circle that had broken. Seeing this as a sign from my Grandmother (this property was hers) I pocketed it and hiked the mile in the ice and snow back to my parked car. Since salvaging the mirror and moving it from studio to studio it has continued to break, but in those breaks I see the hope of reconciliation with my father rather than bad luck and the loss of what could have been.
