LandEscape Art Review | Page 182

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
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