10 Aug Featured CPAC Member: Brenda Biondo
BRENDA BIONDO
Member Since: 2009
ABOUT THE ARTIST
The daughter of a commercial photographer and art director, Brenda Biondo grew up surrounded by photography and has been making photographs for more than 30 years. Her work focuses on three distinct areas: constructed abstractions; conservation and land-based issues; and the way cultural artifacts move from the past into the present.
Brenda’s work has been exhibited in shows throughout the country and published in numerous print and online publications, including The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The Denver Post and Lenscratch. Her photographs are in the collections of the Library of Congress, the Museum of Photographic Arts, the San Diego Museum of Art and the collections of numerous corporations and individuals. A solo exhibit of her work opened at the San Diego Museum of Art in July 2017. Her book of photographs, Once Upon a Playground, was published by the University Press of New England in 2014 and is now the subject of a five-year traveling exhibit organized by ExhibitsUSA.
STATEMENT: Paper Skies
Artists from Josef Albers to James Turrell have focused attention on how perception of color is a matter of context. Inspired by this history of color theory practice, I investigate natural light, atmospheric color and the photograph as object, putting the most ubiquitous of subjects — the sky — into unconventional contexts to create illusions that challenge expectations. My work references the Light and Space movement’s emphasis on light as subject, while the images’ formal aesthetics are influenced by the broad history of modern painting, particularly minimalism, color field and hard edge abstraction.
All images in Paper Skies and Moving Pictures are created by re-photographing a folded and/or cut print of a sky image (grey clouds, blue sky or sunset close-up) in front of actual sky. (There is no post-production manipulation.) In Paper Skies, the juxtaposition of the print against the actual sky creates an abstract image that emphasizes the ambiguity between the real and the reproduced, and allows the original printed photograph to be seen in a new context as a three-dimensional geometric form. The paper on which the original image is printed transcends its role as simply a substrate for photographic imagery and becomes an active ingredient whose edges, texture and shape play a key role in the final image. The shadows created as the print is re-photographed attest to the interaction between the subject and the environment, and reveal the artist’s involvement in creating questions of space and geometry.