LandE scape
CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW
LandEscape meets
Cynthia Brannvall
An interview by Katherine Williams, curator and Josh Ryder, curator landescape @ europe. com
Visual artist Cynthia Brannval ' s work a channel of communication between the inner Self and the outside world: her hybrid and unconventional practice accomplishes the difficult task of challenging the relationship between the viewers ' perceptual parameters and their cultural substratum to induce them to elaborate personal associations, offering them a multilayered aesthetic experience and urging to question the relationship between the notions of landscape and identity. One of the most impressive aspects of Brannvall ' s work is the way it accomplishes a successful attempt to inquire into hybridity, inbetween spaces and underrepresented perspectives, waliking the viewers through a journey towards the liminal are between the real and the imagined. We are very pleased to introduce our readers to her stimulating artistic production.
Hello Cynthia and welcome to LandEscape: before starting to elaborate about your artistic production would you like to tell us something about your background? You have a solid background and after having earned your BA of History and Practice of Art, you nurtured your education with a Master of Arts in History of Art, that you received from the San Francisco State University.
How do these experience influence your evolution as an artist? And in particular, how does your cultural substratum dued to your mixed ethnic heritage inform the way you relate yourself to art making and to the aesthetic problem in general?
1) Hello Thank you for this opportunity to talk about my work. Yes I did a double major at UC Berkeley and received a BA in Art Practice and Art History and then did graduate work in Art History where I completed a MA program at San Francisco State University. Before I enrolled at UC Berkeley my art work was primarily based in drawing and oil painting with a little bit of image based collage work and centered on landscape and the Higure. While pursuing my undergraduate degree in Art Practice at UC Berkeley I began exploring new materials as mediums. I was doing a degree in art history simultaneously and so I was becoming acutely aware of long established aesthetic hierarchies and the artists and art movements that rebelled against those conventions. I wasn’ t necessarily trying to emulate those artists but I started to think about materials differently. I started to see media and material as conceptual signiHiers tied to particular histories regardless of what subject matter they were used to convey. In addition, I started using my art practice as a way to process what I was encountering in the art historical research I was doing. My honors thesis in Art
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