Exhibitions 2019: Brandon Forrest Frederick & Renee Piechocki

May 24 - September 9, 2019

Brandon Forrest Frederick

Inspired by witnessing the futility of using a leaf blower on a windy day, this video references the human desire to structure uncontrollable forces.

Brandon Forrest Frederick is an interdisciplinary artist, educator, and organizer based in Kansas City, Missouri. His work explores many relational aspects to living in a capitalistic and consumption based society. In using images, videos, sculptures, and found objects he looks to reveal poetic and poignant moments within the everyday and provide a new sense of agency in the act of disruption. To that effect he uses humor, performative gestures, models of reproduction, image making, community collaboration, and moments of civic imagination, organization, and reinterpretation. Each of these points of interaction facilitate a multi-faceted approach to dealing with the inequities of our current situation while learning to cope within the peculiar humor of it all.

Renee Piechocki

My work begins with wandering. Simple walks, long excursions, and relocations provide clues about projects I want to make. Along the way, I seek out situations, objects, and places. Things that are beautiful, odd, frightening, humorous, or incomplete attract me. I push myself to explore what is unfamiliar. 

In my studio practice, I work with content gathered through exploration. There is no script. I sift through existing images and capture new ones as conceptual threads, themes, allowing narratives to emerge. I use simple editing methods to emphasize, distill, or bridge them conceptually. My presentation style is direct. I aim to create content that is recognizable. Current topics in my work include intuition, trust, isolation, and travel.

This video developed during an artist residency on the Olympic Peninsula in Washington State. Alone in a cabin in the woods for two weeks, I spent time listening and watching, recording sounds and images in the forest. The video captures changes in the wind, light, and my comfort level.  

In addition to her studio practice, Renee Piechocki is engaged with collaborative projects as an artist and public art consultant. She is based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and graduated from Hunter College with a degree in Studio Art.

This exhibition is a part of inaugural festival run by the DATMA (Design Art Technology Massachusetts), titled Summer Winds 2019 along with the exhibitions Spencer Finch: Wind (Through Emily Dickinson’s Window) at Gallery 244 and Elizabeth Keithline: (The Air) As It Moves at University Art Gallery.