Meet David Quakenbush | Creative Director & Communications Strategist

We had the good fortune of connecting with David Quakenbush and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi David, any advice for those thinking about whether to keep going or to give up?
So the answer to this depends a little on what you’re abandoning. On one hand, you never give up on the goal. But you should never remain attached to a tactic if it’s obviously not going to work. Part of adapting is to give up on an approach as soon as it becomes clear that it’s played out.

Let’s talk shop? Tell us more about your career, what can you share with our community?
The branding people say it’s important to focus your story, so when people think about you only one thing comes to mind. That makes your identity sharp. That’s not how my work works, although it’s what I do for my consulting clients at the Connection Bureau ( https://connection-bureau.com ).

Art is manifest intent. Whatever it is you mean to be, you can implement with whatever materials are at hand. Creation is also an innately destructive process. Whatever it is you’re creating with will need to be taken apart, so you can recreate it in your own way. In photography: peel the emulsion from the paper. Make the contact sheet the canvas. Break the lens. In digital, examine the glitches. Celebrate the seams between pixels. I’m still exploring VR as a medium, with custom-built 3D camera rigs, with an eye on gaussian splatting as a next frontier. Anything that can be experienced can be expressively reconfigured. Be omnivorous. Create with damp earth. Deconstruct your AI. There are no rules. Go play.

The dirty secret for all communication is that your audience will reward you for whispering their secrets back to them, but in a way that’s safe for them to access. They may not even recognize it when they do. This is the key to great marketing and the secret to meaningful artwork. Representing that thing, whatever it is, through a symbol is mythmaking. That’s the connection to the work, and for those who share the impact, a rally point to connect to each other.

My time as a filmmaker gave me a love for cinematic scale. Respect for the importance of timing. And a strange relationship with physical output. So much goes into building the sets, the costumes, and the incredible technical complexity of building a great scene — but the end result is a stream of light on a screen. Once you have the images you can discard the rest. And those images can last forever. I want to strip these to their simplest forms. Can I capture people with a simple visual pulse, or a wall-sized loop that tells a story but is also endless? What about an environment that compels an interaction or generates an experience? How can this translate to other media? VR/AR tools are still a work in progress for me.

To succeed (and I’m not entirely sure I have) you have to honor your tools and just keep showing up to do the work.

Any places to eat or things to do that you can share with our readers? If they have a friend visiting town, what are some spots they could take them to?
For some reason my response to this question has to do with moments of transition, appropriate as so much of the city has reinvented itself as something more angular, something less interesting.

We’d sit on the bridge at Thronton Parkway and I-25 and watch the sunrise. That’s the gateway to the city. If it’s a hazy winter morning you can see the billowing clouds from the refinery drift toward the buildings sprouting from downtown. It’s a breathtaking view before you descend into the smog. Maybe we’d take 270 east, to look at the pipes and flames, and experience the odd sensation of breathing Vaseline-flavored air. Then something trendy for brunch in the area formerly known as five-points.

Or we’d go to US Thai in Edgewater, where “mild plus” means hot as the sun. Maybe My Brother’s Bar. Or marvel at the delicious surliness of El Tacos de Mexico. “I once fell in love in a little cafe down the way, it’s a Keller Williams now.”

We’d wander through the DCPA campus, but not buy any tickets. But skip the blue bear and the art museum.

We’d drive to Breck, over Loveland Pass during peak leaf-peeping season. Along the way we would loiter slightly at Genesee, where the overpass perfectly frames the first row of real mountains. That’s where we make our own picture postcards. Maybe we’d wind up in Fairplay, to see the burros run if we timed it just right, then walk between the most famous (but also seemingly unknown) row of houses in the state.

We’d rent a motorcycle and ride up Golden Gate Canyon, then peak-to-peak all the way to Estes Park. Or up Deer Creek Canyon, then Turkey Creek Road, then enchiladas at that one Mexican joint in Aspen Park. That’s as great as pedaling a bicycle in the summertime along the canal from Cherry Creek to LoDo then back. There would be froyo involved.

Or we’d take in a show (any show) at Red Rocks. But only if it was likely to rain. That’s a right of passage–it’s a cliche for a reason.

Shoutout is all about shouting out others who you feel deserve additional recognition and exposure. Who would you like to shoutout?
There is a universe of personalities who lent sage advice, collaborated constructively, or who opened doors, windows, and perhaps a trapdoor of opportunity or two. Lonnie Hanzon, Mona Lucero, Charlie Miller, Jenna Hawkins, Patrick Sheridan, Fred Murrell, Alex Agosta-Weimer, Tim Nolte and Vadim Elkind, Kendra Buck, Swann Christopher, and Jonathan Fulton are all directly implicated. This list could fill a book with many chapters.

Website: https://connection-bureau.com

Linkedin: https://co-bur.com/g/li

Facebook: https://facebook.com/quakenbush

Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ynFVw3FNiNA

Image Credits
Photography by David Quakenbush (except for the photo OF David Quakenbush, which was taken by Madi Glauser. Who is awesome).