Bio

Trained as a photographer, Brenna Youngblood (b. 1979 Riverside, California) has developed a practice that mines images and their formal qualities as a way to create a challenging conversation between representation and the politics of abstraction. Using photos, found objects, and other unique materials to create her painterly compositions, she explores the relationship between language and materiality, allowing materials to articulate complex narratives. For this exhibition Youngblood has created a series of sculptural works that bridge her unique treatment of materials with a rigorous investigation of the materiality of language and the semiotics of identity construction. Approaching language conceptually as a malleable form, she strips the names of various historical and popular culture figures down to the barest elements of their identification: the initials that commonly stand in for their names. Focusing on formal elements of sculpture such as scale, color, volume, and composition instead of representational imagery, Youngblood creates slippages between the historical, the biographical, and the imaginary, elegantly assembling a charged conversation about the role that language plays in the fabrication of difference.