catapult magazine

The Desolate Magnolia

Drawings for the End of the World

by Brent Aldrich

The Desolate Magnolia (Drawings for the End of the World) from brent aldrich on Vimeo.

Artist’s Statement:

Within the construction of images, the processes of mediums, the hand authoring representation, there are spaces created. Mediums overlap, or give way; distances form between the representation and the real; images become disconnected from people, from the land, from local culture and memory. My practice has been to work in these spaces, to understand the disconnections, the structures by which they are created and sustained, beginning with my hand as an image-maker and the processes of the mediums. Representation of the land in particular is synonymous with the physical use of the land; as we are apart from the land, so is the photograph a means of creating more distance.

The Desolate Magnolia (Drawings for the End of the World) uses appropriated film stills from Hollywood special effects of the destruction of the world in one channel; the second channel is of my hand making charcoal rubbings from a magnolia leaf. Both the medium and the message of the technological images are of destruction; the disconnect of the special effects happens congruently with the actual physical degradation of the land. The other half of the diptych is my hand making rubbings, drawing — literally — from life. I am proposing an alternative mode of representation that is rooted in an awareness of the hand of the maker and the construction of images, an affinity for memory rather than history and a connection to the land, providing a specific place for me to critique a more ubiquitous cultural representation that is place-less, totalizing, disconnected and exploitative.