Heather Brand
My work primarily uses photography to consider our relationship to depictions of the natural world in built environments meant to house and contain nature for the sake of entertainment or education. Think natural history museums, aviaries, and botanical gardens. I am most interested in what gets left out in the process of approximating or depicting a likeness, regardless of the medium used. In my piece, Imitation Study V.2, I use a single photograph as a starting point for a series of 365 consecutive traces, each one accentuating the slight errors and inaccuracies of the previous trace until a whole new shape is formed. I like to think of this process as related to the game of telephone, the small bits of information lost in the retelling snowball until something new, unrecognizable, and a little funny emerges. For this piece, I use drawing as a tool for transforming the representational into something else entirely.
Heather Brand is a photographer/mixed media artist living and working in Meadville Pennsylvania. Born in upstate New York she has an MFA in Visual Studies from the University of Buffalo and is an Associate Professor of Art at Allegheny College. Her work looks at the collection, cultivation, and recreation of the natural world and considers our compulsion to re-contextualize and re-create that which is deemed natural.
IG: @hbran1
