Tara Brady is currently a Ph.D. candidate in Experimental Psychology at the University of Maine. She studies aesthetics, creativity, and perception under the scientific doctrine of empiricism. She hopes that science will uncover the fact that there is something uncoverable in the artistic process.
In addition, she is of "team nine," an artistic collaboration with Katherine Roettinger and Lake Allen. Working in a group allows for open criticism as well as inspiration. Tara's own style is self-dubbed as "tape recording." She layers different qualities of tape (masking, duct, drywall, etc.) over and under acrylic paint and various objects that happen to be around at the given moment. For example, one painting includes broken watch, while another has rough drafts of her Master's thesis. After the layering process, she unearths lower layers, thus making destruction a viable part of the creative process. As such, her art attempts to "tape record" the moment as a dynamic, individualistic process, rather than a static representation.
She is also quite proud of her numerous journals. She treats these journals as viable artworks, not as sketchbooks for later projects. Again, in these journals layering is a recurrent theme: she uses razor blades to cut through one page to unearth lower layers.
A third, but highly important, characteristic of her work is her devotion to the number 43. It is treated as a muse, thematically represented in most of her paintings, and as the constant theme that ties the string of moments together. In some instances, the use of 43 is blatant and obvious, in others it remains very subtle: much like the coincidences that permeate everyone's life.
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