Arden Bendler Browning | Black Forest

“To know where we came from – and what we came through – doesn’t have to mean we know any more clearly where we are, except not there, anymore. The forest begins where civilization ends, so I’d been told.”

-Among the Trees, by Carl Phillips

Tinney Contemporary is proud to present Black Forest, a solo exhibition of works by Arden Bendler Browning. The exhibition will be on display from August 17 to September 21, 2024. The opening reception will be held on Saturday, September 7 from 5:00 to 8:00 p.m. in conjunction with the First Saturday Art Crawl.

The impetus for Arden Bendler Browning’s most recent body of work came from a trip to Rülzheim, Germany and its surrounding landscape—a place which her Jewish ancestors were forced to flee in 1935 after Hitler’s rise to power. Borrowing Daniel Mason’s notion of “Witness Trees,” Bendler Browning hones in on the landscape-as-observer and, in turn, makes careful observation of the “witness”—transcribing the arboreal sentries of the Black Forest using collage, spray paint, and gouache. The dark expanses in these works mark a departure in Bendler Browning’s practice, both visually and conceptually, as the shadows lend these landscapes a novel degree of depth. Contrasting with the immediacy of the screens embedded in several of the works, a dislocated, shifting sense of perspective plays out across the surfaces of the panels.

In Black Forest, Bendler Browning undertakes a transposition that is twofold: a rendering of three-dimensional space in two dimensions, as well as a translation of past to present. Taken more broadly, the work delves into the archetypal weight of forests: mythological places that shelter wolves and witches as well as wanderers and refugees. Moreover, it is the specific history of the Black Forest, as well as the artist’s connection to it, which emerges as a key. In some sense, history is literally absorbed and recorded within the rings of trees, as climate conditions, rainfall, scars from fires—even bullets, in some instances—are preserved in the concentric circles of their trunks. Bendler Browning’s lens-shaped tondos mimic these circular bandings, as well as most nearly approximating a human field-of-vision; a lens, a portal. Each piece becomes a document of the artist reckoning with a haunted landscape. Though the events of the haunting are sealed off, this reckoning is preserved as gesture, as color and form.

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