Brandy Eve Allen – [←] 1331-036 (2016); [→] 1151-11 (2013)

Initially, the plan was to use this post to heap praise upon Allen’s thoroughly distinct and downright exceptional analog photography.

Then I read her artist statement/bio… new plan: let’s talk about how artists speak about their work.

There’s this notion–as far as I know originating with Renoir–that art ceases to be art as soon as it begins to require explanation.

Practically speaking Balthus’ 1968 retrospective at the Tate was probably the last time anyone has gotten away with the let the work speak for itself tact. Curators, gallerists and the gatekeepers of high culture all demand artist statement tributes and offerings of a modicum of veiled explanation. (I am not suggesting that instinct is entirely pointless… just that it almost always undercuts the mystery and nobility of the work. (Not to mention situates the audience in a position not only of passive acceptance but inferior receptivity where one must be educated regarding the merit of what one is has or is about to experience.)

It is very rare that an artist’s statement not only clarifies but also illuminates. Allen’s is an example.

…Sometimes
I just want to photograph things, see the pictures and burn the
negatives.  It’s overwhelming at times, all these memories trapped in
36x24mm acetate frames.

..I’m
not doing this for myself, I don’t have much say in what’s going on.  
When I look back at what’s come through and what’s been made, I don’t
know how I did most of it.  It was another person than I am now.  And
now I’m making things that one day I’ll look back on and say, I’m
another person now, once again.

…Everyone’s
a photographer.  It’s not so precious anymore.  The “print” is lost… on
a search to find it.  Old cardboard with moisture stains and a
distressed image with a small frame around it, nothing fancy, something
cherished.  I’ve got ideas, about to act on them.

…Fever.  Avoiding suicide.

…There’s
actually a group of aliens making my work, I have no idea how it’s
done, they just give it to me and I present it, that’s what you see
here.

…I’m
waking up with the sun everyday, I can feel it peering over the horizon
like a cat meowing to be fed.  Laying in bed, thinking about who is the
real Banksy, some article online got my brain spinning too early,
again.  I have a ton of friends who are all half my age, I know there’s
something to analyze there.  Watching people my age turn into their
parents, they said that would happen.  I feel no sense of beginning,
middle and end, I’m living in a timeless existence where one day I will
cease to exist, taking that last breath and never saying anything more
into this world.  I’m lost there, in that last breath, extending it for
as long as I can.

…Someone asked me this week what are my photos about?  Okay, no one asked me, I was asking myself.  And I stood there, silent.

….These
last couple series I’ve been working on, Gestures, Sunken Dream and
Earth Water are shot with 35mm film using multiple exposure techniques.
I shot fireworks, underwater sea life at the aquarium, plants and the
sea and then reshot the same rolls with a figure posing in my studio.
There’s never any digital modification on my photos.  I could probably
create something similar with less orchestration involved but It’s just
too easy to use photoshop, I need to be challenged.  I don’t like taking
the easy way out, I’ll get burned if necessary.  I like process.  I
like figuring it out.  I like going to the museum and looking up real
close to the canvas and figuring out how the artist made something, and
then I want to know if they were feeling what this piece makes me feel.
I start to wonder about strangers…

… The three stages of Emotional Exile: Shock, Surrender, Catharsis.

… I’m not a fan, I’m an admirer.

… 4:20

….I used to hate photographs where the feet or hands were cut off, but now it doesn’t bother me.

…I
trust myself more than anyone else, especially when it comes to
developing my own film.  My kitchen and dining area are my lab.  I
photograph my friends, or will pose myself.  Some of my friends are
people I’m really close to, some are people I’m not as close to but I
feel a strong connection with.  All these people who are at different
places in their lives, figuring it all out.

…There’s a sense of surrender, but not in a losing sense, one who surrenders to themselves and gives up on apologies.

….When
nothing seems like everything and everything seems like nothing.
no-mans-land feels like an invisible trap door.  No one, not a one.  In
the ear of the great sea, I call it closer.  Hear the blahs slipping
into aahs. Timing is a mother fucker.

….I’m
just really into passion fruit.  I love the contradicting taste, the
sweet and the sour, the fact that it’s not easy to eat, that I have to
shove my face inside it to lick out all the seeds.

….That
moment when I go out on the road with just me, my cameras and a bag of
various clothing pieces.  Into the wild, following the weather until it
brings me somewhere and then I set up the tripod, figure out what to
wear, if anything, and prepare the camera for a shot.  Meter the light,
focus, filter.  I have 10 seconds to run into place and then place
myself there as if I belonged.  On to the next.  I promise myself that
every moment I even think about photographing, I have to stop and
capture it.  I’m not taking anything for granted.  

….There
are a million ways I could describe myself and today I’m going to put
it like this… I’m a contradiction but I mean everything I say.  The
noise of the city gets to me and I’m counting the days until I get to
where sweaters.  I’m dreaming of traveling to far off places with just
me, my camera and a sense of adventure, meeting random amazing souls
along the way.

I won’t be able to enumerate all the ways this statement compliments her work. However, there is a central theme: fragmentation.

She speaks of her work as if aliens possessed her and while in control her body made the work. She also uses multiple exposures. There’s mention of how the past is discontinuous with the present, etc.

The form of the statement replicates this approach–the disjointed thought fragments in the writing mirror the visual form of her work.

David Bowie famously practiced decoupage–he’d tear up his lyrics and then re-order them looking for new patterns to emerge. Allen is doing something very similar with both her photography and her statement. In effect: making sense of her statement doesn’t so much explain the work as it offers a map of how to approach the work–that is: getting a sense of the words on the page is a process that is more or less interchangeable when applied to the work.

It all reminds me of a conversation I had while back with a friend who was telling me about a course she took where a writing professor taught a course on literary form but in a way which reduced form to graphical representation.

It strikes me that Allen’s work is very much about illustrating how to use photography to read between the lines. (And with the notion of reading between the lines there’s traces of Renoir’s notion of art being opposed to explanation–i.e. telling someone to read between the lines means that you either won’t do it for them or that you can’t because it’s so obvious that if they can’t see it, then the explanation won’t help them.)

Between the lines is actually an idea which can be graphically illustrated, actually:

Yet, it is possible to deploy the same elements of the above graphical representation in a host of manner which preserve the conceptual integrity of the original while providing more open ended interpretations:

Or:

The ratio of shadow to highlight are the same in all three examples, yet they each have a different psycho-aesthetic effect.

It’s a huge leap to realize that photography is hard wired with the ability to illustrate what is between the lines. But that fact that Allen not only realizes it but is exploring the possibilities so assiduously is goddamn breathtaking.