CONTINUITY

Susan Brenner is a Charlotte-based artist who uses a variety of media to make statements about our world today, as well as the human condition. She combines photography and painting to create a series of work dealing with concepts such as fluidity, migration, movement, and societal change. Brenner explores rich textures, abstract forms, and the evolution of movement in her paintings and prints; she is constantly exploring and experimenting, but sometimes revisiting earlier phases, or even coming full circle. Brenner is facile with rendering and expressing an aliveness in her art, as she finds ways to explore the mysteries of the world while fearlessly plunging into unknown territory and experimenting with ways in which to compose and express individuality.

Featuring works across multiple series, this exhibition celebrates and explores the through line of Brenner’s artistic practice and the conceptual, material, and technical connections among bodies of work. Through a variety of ideations and modes of making, Brenner has cultivated a rich studio practice, marrying digital with analog, photography with painting, research with application, world-observing with world-building.

Works from Brenner’s The State of Things and Wreckage examine the rapid pace of change, consumerism, and constant cycle of both natural and man-made disasters. Presenting tenuous and colorful compositions, this exhibition highlights Brenner’s emotional response to the world’s relentless consumption of goods and natural resources without concern for consequence, resulting in excess, chaos, and destruction.

Natural Histories, a body of abstract works on paper, was created by combining digital and hand techniques. Brenner stripped color from images she had created over a period of years, “weathering” the images to become nothing more than a complex maze of lines. Brenner felt as though she was traveling forward in time to a point when, as an archaeologist, she would discover these “skeletal remains” of her own making. Once discovered, these “remains” were layered and built up to create new structures to which color was added, thereby “reincarnating” them into new life forms.

Digital prints and paintings from Migrations and After Migrations are inspired by the idea of migration, broadly defined as dispersion – the mixing and mingling of substances as they travel from one area to another, taking up space in territories already inhabited by others. This kind of movement seems aptly metaphorical for much that is happening in our world on every level – from the micro to the macro – as all sorts of populations, life forms, materials, and phenomena move, come in contact with each other, and intermix in the process. The results can be simultaneously familiar and unpredictable, colorfully beautiful yet unsettling.