Cynthia Brannvall
LandE scape
CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW
History was about a painting called Oath of the Ancestors which featured the fathers of the Haitian Revolution. I was reading a lot about the historical context of that period. I was reading about slavery, military campaigns in France and the Caribbean, the maroons and Voudon. My art practice allowed me to process the emotional impact of that information and gave me the space to contemplate my own ancestral connection and disconnection to that history. That was the beginning of how my formal education began to alter my artwork and it continued in graduate school. I had the vision for Continents when I Hinished at UC Berkeley but it took me three years to make. In graduate school the area of my emphasis shifted from the early modern period to Contemporary Art and I used the ideas of Édouard Glissant as my theoretical framework. I found his ideas as well as notions of Hybridity and Hydrarchy to be very compelling in their ability to offer perspectives and methodologies that are not bound in binaries. I would say that my art practice is obliquely engaged with those ideas.
My own mixed heritage does play a role in how I think about identity formation for individual and the collective which is a pervasive theme in my art. My background is full of unlikely pairings. In addition there is a distance from the various cultures that inform my identity. I identify as a black woman. Not just because my father was African American but also because being black in America is a particular experience. My father was not in my life when I was growing up so I missed out on that history and that culture – although I am very drawn to it, embrace it and feel that it is a fundamental part of my identity and experience. From his DNA there is some Native American Ancestry. I was primarily raised by my grandmother who was Swedish. She grew up on a reindeer farm in Lulea and was extremely religious and hard working. I have some of her sensibilities, habits and rituals despite having never been to Sweden. And then there was my beautiful mother who was so steeped in the 1960’ s counter culture, she was never able to recover and being her daughter was akin to having Janis Joplin for a parent. There are ways in which that counter culture is a part of my identity as well. I think the circumstances of my own identity have resulted in a perspective of identity and culture as things that are not Hixed but ever in a state of transformation. This is a personal link that I have to the ideas of Glissant. In Poetics of Relation he says,“ Rhizomatic thought is the principle behind what I call the Poetics of Relation, in which each and every identity is extended through a relationship with the Other.” I saw how my grandmother’ s Swedish identity was transformed by her experience as an American and by having a mixed race granddaughter. My grandmother and I were both transformed by the difference we encountered in one another. So yes I do connect ideas of hybridity that I encountered through academia to my personal experience and those ideas Hind their way into my work.
You are a versatile artist and the results of your research convey together a coherent sense of unity, that rejects any conventional classification. Before starting to elaborate about your production, we would suggest to our readers to visit http:// cynthiabrannvall. com in order to get a synoptic view of your multifaceted artistic production. Your draw a lot from elements belonging to universal imagery works stimulate the viewer’ s psyche and consequently works on both a
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