Montgomery, AL - The Anita P. Folmar Gallery located at the Armory Learning Arts Center, Montgomery, AL is pleased to present an exhibition of new works by P. Hope Brannon.  The show will run from July 15, 2013 - August 30, 2013.

 

Wetumpka, Alabama resident and native P. Hope Brannon’s latest exhibition “Fossils of Time” presents a contemporary interpretation of the southwestern landscape and that of Chaco Canyon, New Mexico.  Her works are landscape inspired pieces that explore unconventional painting techniques and materials.  Shape, symbol and line are driving forces which result in a richly textural body of work.

 

In 1990 Hope Brannon returned from her first of many trips to Chaco Canyon to her 1906 wood-frame cottage in Wetumpka, Alabama and began to bridge the hectic pace of now with the slower more deliberate pace of the past.  Brannon’s work explores the mixed media process of combining sculpture with drawing and painting, while freely experimenting with a variety of materials, processes, media and forms of abstraction and representation.

In her latest body of work, Fossils of Time, the drawing is a very physical kind, with layers of lines and textures that trace a history of place and people through mark making and gestures.  Using sticks and commonly available tools to inscribe lines is an ancient practice, reaching back to the mysterious, early cave and rock art of primitive cultures known as petroglyphs and pictographs.   This art form is associated mostly with shamans engaged in trying to control and bring order to their world. 

 

Brannon’s drawing is first and foremost a tactile, embodied experience that links her work with graffiti art as gestural statement.  Making a mark says, I am here.  Graffiti’s meshing of language and image into one indivisible sign also connects with Brannon’s long-standing interest in etymology, questioning what is a language and how we have communicated our experiences... symbols, shapes, code, words, marks, music, math, even DNA.  Her work is partially inspired by studying ancient cave art, observing the southwestern landscapes of the Anasazi and their drawings, and partially by observing young children’s attempts at writing and drawing. The accumulation of gesture and effort with graphite in her drawings on paper results in an increasing shift to darkness, while other mediums melt onto the surface of the paper. In her sculptural paintings the lines obsessively trace out the shapes of her invented interpretations of a landscape and its inhabitants. Her work also brings to mind Jasper Johns’ repeated use of alphabets and numbers, Mark Toby’s calligraphic paintings and the action oriented work of Jasper Johns.

 

About P. Hope Brannon

Hope Brannon is an Alabama based artist.  Her most recent work includes sculptural paintings and drawings that convey her interpretations of place.  Her work casts a different light on the idea of place, land and its artifacts and the cultures that inhabited it. These abstract interpretations introduce the dichotomy of the visual landscape and places charged with memory, meaning, and their hidden artifacts and energy.  On the most obvious level, we expect a landscape to be a picture of the land, which may or may not incorporate these issues. We assume that the artist observed a place, an event in the world and wanted to record it.  But, these images are really not of anything in that sense. They register only the result of observing and studying a landscape and all that the spirit of a place includes. On a technical level these contemporary interpretations are both drawings and bas-relief sculptures that have a modern resemblance to the petroglyphs and pictographs of past cultures and civilizations.  Brannon received her B.A. in Fine Art from Auburn University, Montgomery, AL and her M.S. Education (Art) from Troy University, Troy, AL.  She has shown in small and large scale shows since 1988.  She resides in Wetumpka, Alabama with her husband Jimmy.

 

 

"Fossils of Time" will run through August 30, 2013 at The Anita P. Folmar Gallery at the Armory Learning Art Center.  Gallery Hours are from 8 am until 5pm Monday through Thursday, and 8 am until 3pm on Friday.  For additional information please contact: Danae Morgan: 334-241-2583 / dmorgan@montgomeryal.gov or Hope Brannon: 334-300-3779/artquest@elmore.rr.com  

 

To visit Hope on the web:  http://artquest.wix/hopebrannon or  phopebrannon.com

 

# # #

 

The Anita P. Folmar Gallery at the Armory Learning Arts Center, 1018 Madison Avenue, Montgomery AL 36104 | tel 334-241-2583 | dmorgan@montgomeryal.gov