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Everyone needs a place to escape. A place where they can relax. An area of safety that they can go to, anytime. And especially in an era when some people are so completely overtaken by their careers, a space to step out of that environment is key for healthy living. There are numerous ways people do it - many perform some type of physical activity, some meditate, and others even use drugs or alcohol to escape. But in this book, however, we chose to focus in on two forms of escape that aren’t as
typically looked at as ways to help live life: art and music.
I had always known what it felt like for me to become entranced in music, and more recently, I’ve become more interested in trying to find escape through visual art, like photography, but I never knew what exactly other people got from it. I wanted to know why people chose to create art or play music over other things, and how they felt when they were in the middle of that. I wanted to know what purpose that activity had in their lives and more importantly, I wanted to understand the impact of that activity on their mind.
My partner Evan and I began this documentary with the idea that these artists would be escaping out of everyday life to find generally the same thing: comfort. But through talking with all these different people, we realized that’s a major
generalization of artists and musicians, considering there are so many. What we did find is that even though these people are all participating in totally different activities for completely different reasons, the common factor between them is that these people are at some point making a leap from their everyday lives to a different mental place - an escape. Through this
realization, we decided that we would find the similarities in the different forms of expression that are extremely unique to each
individual looked at here.
The people examined in this book allowed us to peer inside a very personal side of their lives, and they shared with us their thoughts and ideas on important subjects. For that, we thank each of them for making this project possible so that others can understand what escape is, and realize the strength and power these forms of expression can have on people. This book is dedicated to you.