“Land of the ______”
Concept | Changing circumstances challenged my pre-existing realities. As a result, fear and shame emerged from the depths of my subconscious. The reality was always there, but I could not see it. With an accumulation of new knowledge and narratives, what I had previously accepted as truth was suddenly dislodged, as was my grasp on myself. As I extracted the old perception, I turned to language as a means for shedding and redefining this newly displaced truth. Through sculpture and language, I materialized the blockage that obstructed me from the place of fear and vulnerability. I magnified and transformed it into a display: a physical, built structure whose scale requires confrontation. My process became about reconsidering what and for whom a word represents, the limits of language as communication, and the need for reparation. Legibility shifts throughout this work as I continue to struggle with confrontation.
Bio | Carley Brandau was born in North Carolina to a family of builders, stuff-collectors, artists and musicians. She received her Bachelor of Arts with a concentration in Sculpture from the University of North Carolina Asheville in 2013. Before entering the Master of Design program at SAIC in 2016, Brandau was working at the Black Mountain College Museum and Arts Center in Asheville, NC, as well as her favorite hair salon, and maintaining her independent studio practice. Driven by her experiences from growing up in the south + the current political climate, her work is a haptic and somatic exploration of our hands, bodies and language.