ARDEN BENDLER BROWNING

“The longer I look, to keep learning to see—to create something of this world that is also not at all of this world. I am an explorer, always wanting to know more. Poured, brushed, wiped, drawn, erased, stained, dripped. It is never one thing —always multiples, always plural. The longer I look, the more I am noticing the ways the colors talk to each other, becoming vague and then specific and then vague again - like a still image that is moving”

Arden Bendler Browning creates vibrant abstract paintings, small works on paper, and virtual reality (VR) environments referencing cities, landscapes, and perspectives of place. In Arden’s words, “My work explores connections and gaps between memory and presence, the impossibility of landscape as a singular idealized image, and the way that digital media affects perception. Through lap-size drawings made while in motion, virtual reality environments made in response to enlarged versions of those drawings, and wall-size paintings made in response to the VR works, my practice is continually fed by a cycle of layered experience…”

Browning often draws inspiration from her travels and works from sketches taken of the moving landscape on road trips, emphasizing a liminal and fluid experience of place. Her large-scale paintings on round panels are akin to the round lens and visual range of the virtual environments she creates. She describes a symbiotic relationship between the process of creating the physical painting and the virtual one, in which observations in one medium inform the other: “…this cycle of works informing and diluting subsequent products is my way of combining traditional art materials and technology to enhance and play with the ways we abstractly experience the world in the 21stcentury.”

Arden Bendler Browning lives and works in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Here work has been exhibited and collected internationally.