Donna Bassin Land scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW statement.' I only recognize the threads in my work once I look back. But in retrospect, each of my series retains elements from a previous project, either an unresolved aesthetic problem or a return to an aesthetic device that worked. Inspired by the seductive beauty of the Hudson River School painters, the images from the Environmental Melancholia series seem to aim is not to recreating the scene but rather to reflect and learn from its aesthetic. As a visual artist whose work is focussed on real enviromental images, how do you consider the relationship between reality and imagination playing within your process? Moreover, how do you consider the role of memory playing wthin your artistic process? Donna Bassin: You inquire about my work's play of memory, reality, and imagination. Discussing these ideas about the experience and how they play out in my work is only possible by considering their relationship or interaction. My understanding about memory is that it isn’t a fixed thought, although I suppose some memories appear as thought objects that appear and disappear. Instead, memory is dynamic, constantly changing, and is newly constructed over time as we remember and re-member”. I think we remember in fragments and only put these fragments into a story or narrative when we speak them to another and impart an emotional truth. I don’t see reality and imagination as discrete – the awareness has impacted even the world of science that so-called truth is affected by an observer who changes the experience in the act of subjective perception.