ARTIST STATEMENT
My work serves as an inquiry into the entangled terrain of inner and outer worlds extending to the complex and often contradictory relationship that humans have with nature, our bodies and our environments at large. Concrete as a medium, with its heavy history and inherent dualities (ancient/modern, ugly/beautiful, natural/ artificial, permanence/ impermanence) speaks to the nature of paradox. As substances of industrialization, steel and concrete conjure complicated feelings about the natural disasters playing out across the globe and our alienation from nature as well as our own interiority. Learning to navigate the subterranean space of feeling, sensation, and memory has informed the way I relate to the world. It is a realm of being we have been warned not to trust. Placing import on messages that arise from our interior worlds seems antithetical to reason and certainty. It is difficult to ignore the connection between certainty and the violence that has permeated historical progress. It is this myth of progress and the false certainty that drives it that I’m in conversation with.
The concrete figures are castings of a fluid medium solidifying, creating captured space signifying bodies as both objects and internal states. Containers of reified moments, memories, stories, and states of being reaching back through time.
Steel by contrast has a pliability that is often misinterpreted as another form of permanence. However stable it appears, it is defined by its expansion and shrinkage from temperature, oxidization from the most innocuous, ubiquitous, and prevalent of natural forces- humidity and time.
Our bodies are not only records of the events in our lifetimes but according to epigenetic findings, we store memories passed down through ancestral DNA. This is at the very core of the notion that “history repeats itself”. My work is driven by a curiosity to investigate and interpret elements beyond superficial beauty to address the fragility and impermanence of life and the perverse beauty of imperfection.
BIO
Bryna McCann is a Hudson Valley based artist and is Co-Director and founder of Boiler Room Studios – School of Drawing. She studied Traditional Chinese Medicine, the Alexander Technique and various other modalities of body-work in and after college. During this period she spent her extracurricular time studying drawing and painting under several prominent teachers in New York City. She was introduced to the La Jolla Playhouse prop shop during an extended stay in San Diego. It was during this pivotal period that she learned welding and metal fabrication, returning to her child-hood interests in sculptural form. .
At the same time that she was creating abstract works out of steel, she began studying figurative sculpture: first at the California Sculpture Academy, then at the Florence Academy of Art. Thereafter, she received her MFA from the NY Academy of Art where she refined her creative vision and expanded the mediums she worked in. Her most recent work is born out of the challenge of producing a synthesis between abstract and figurative expressions as archetypes that are capable of transcending our perceived reality through various materials: steel, clay, mesh, plaster, wax, stone and concrete,
