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Artist Statement

​My work engages with intersectional entanglements and collisions of history through a feminist lens to explore themes of identity. I use the visual language of art to express individual and collective identities and the histories, cultures, economies and geographies that they are tethered to. I create paintings and sculptures out of vintage and antique clothing fragments and textiles as a nostalgic lure to evoke a soft-landing place to ease into complex conversations about race, labor, history, and slavery. The faded, frayed, stained, and torn fabric fragments conjure the presence and labor of women. The patterns and marks in the materials I use as a media function as potent conceptual signifiers of labor, trade, industry, slavery, luxury, baptisms, weddings, funerals, gender, and history. I imagine the abstract patterns in the material as protein folds of DNA that migrate across bodies of water and continents through the bodies of ancestors. My works exist in an interstitial space between craft and fine art, the past and the present, painting and sculpture, landscape and portrait, abstraction and representation, history and the present. To be fluent in these margins, is to understand the movement of people, ideas, and resources through forced and voluntary migrations with clarity, empathy and honesty.

 © 2020  by Cynthia Brannvall. Proudly created with Wix.com

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