LandE scape
Cynthia Brannvall
CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW
imagination, to challenge the viewers ' parameters. What is the role of memory in your work? We are particularly interested in how you consider memory and its evokative role in showing an alternative way to escape and overcome the recurrent reality.
I am engaged and interested in notions of the landscape that take into account our perceptual experience of being in them. I don’ t deny that borders tethered to the land affect culture, nationality, and identity but I think those notions are not as Hixed as we assume. Ideas drift. My interest is to append reality within a larger context, a deeper memory and other multiple histories. Maybe that’ s the historian in me.
Diasporic Drift is based on an image of land and water— more speciHically the continent of Africa. It is made with indigo dye, sumi and walnut inks, and mineral pigments. The mineral pigments remind me of the tomb paintings I saw in Egypt years ago. When I work with them I feel like I am painting with the substance of jewels and mountains, streams and stone. Indigo dye, ink, and powdered minerals are materials that also make me think of natural resources. The mineral particles disperse over the surface through the carrier of water and rabbit skin glue. As the water evaporates the mineral pigments sit on the surface of the paper and are built up through multiple applications. The process of building up the material is one of chaos and containment. The effect I hope captures a kind of elemental dust set adrift. In addition to exploring identity formation in terms of the individual and larger collectivities, I also play with the macro and micro. I’ m doing it in Diasporic Drift offering a vantage point that could be
Blink
perceived to be from a satellite or a microscope. I have never been to Africa and I am generationally removed from the recollections of my family members who were from Africa and those who were enslaved but it affects me nonetheless. I can only access that deep memory through my imagination. I think to some degree perception and memory are as malleable as imagination. These aspects of our thinking also interact in a kind of
32