Interview with Brian O'Connell and Todd Bourret about their show "Harry & Pete."

Justine the Intern talks with Brian and Todd!

DAC: How did the constraint of time influence your creative process? Do you typically work well under pressure?

Todd: Though we gave ourselves only about a week to produce the work in the show, we were able to develop and refine our concept over several months. It was both thrilling and nerve-wracking to have a plan in order while not having any idea what the resulting objects would really look like.

Brian: For me, time constraints - and this isn't necessarily a good thing - are essential. Without them I rarely feel like I can avoid double and triple guessing, though most of that has already happened by the time a material deadline is actually looming. So, I guess the imposition of this constraint with the knowledge that we'd have time to plan ahead was a bit of a psychological luxury. Yes it was thrilling and a bit scary but it was also motivating. Being 'under the gun' with someone you trust as a collaborator is both exciting and fun. It brought out positive risk-taking in both of us I think.

DAC: While the project was built upon constraint did you find the process itself at all limiting to creativity?

Todd: All exhibitions have these constraints, to varying degrees. We chose to foreground them. I firmly believe that constraints encourage creativity. Not to impose an interpretation, but the exhibition could bee seen as a metaphor for as well as a demonstration of the creative process.

Brian: I agree completely and would only add that sometimes it's fun to look at exhibitions through the lens of such constraints. I think we basically just decided to look at our own production from a similarly blunt but very practically critical perspective of time, space & money.

DAC: How were you forced to reevaluate the role of artist while working (with?) mechanically produced indexes as your medium?

Todd: The work in the show is all very much handmade, and we were both working more or less in our material comfort zones. Though I think neither of us were forced to reevaluate the role of the artist, I had never worked collaboratively before. Fortunately, Brian and I have been in a pretty close dialog for the past five or so years, and came to the project knowing each other's practice more or less inside out. This made for a fruitful and enjoyable working situation.

Brian: I agree completely with Todd's description of our collaborative process. I have rarely worked collaboratively and never in such a tight way. It was a real learning experience. As for the issue of mechanical reproduction and the index I think that is one of the things that makes our working relationship and our practices so compatible. Indexicallity and mechanical reproduction are closely related in as much as mechanical reproduction has implied a degree of indexicallity but clearly indexical processes are not limited to strictly mechanical procedures. In a way I think a lot of what our show deals with, beyond the circumstances of its production, is precisely this point. It is possible to trace through all the objects in the show a chain of indexical relationships, just as a detective might follow the chain of evidence but like a detective in a novel an intuitive leap is required to go beyond this step-by-step procedure and I hope our process made such a leap possible for the viewer.