2023: Consider the Hands

In this series Brandenburg locates and holds the pulse of our shared humanity. Outsized, disproportioned figures, crowd the visual plane. Vaguely ominous landscapes hold themes of contemplation, mourning, presence and transience in the world, as it is. Playing on Picasso’s idealized and outsized women, this body of work coincides with the reappraisal of his legacy, fifty years after his death. Her work takes a neutral stance toward the person who, one hundred years ago, embraced both proportion and distortion, also during a period of global political crisis. Singular or grouped figures are seen in stark reproduction of Picasso’s compositions, or in composite images from several of his works, placed in landscapes from her own photographs and drawings. Rising waters, vessels, beached whales, in a slightly skewed and quietly ominous landscape predominate. Consideration of the hands and their impact is another thread in this work. Her interpretation of one of Stieglitz’s photographs of Georgia O’Keefe’s hands, picking up Greek hydria vessels made thousands of years ago by other hands, reiterates both grounding in history and the elasticity of time. Understatement, glitchy shifts of point of view and depth of field create rhythmic, sometimes shimmery moments of transparency and opacity, resonant of the process of personal and societal reappraisal underway for many of us.