Brenda Biondo's Open Skies (2023) is the cover art and featured article in ARTDESK Magazine's Summer 2023 edition. Biondo's new work, Open Skies, is a large public installation debuted at the Green Box Arts Festival. The festival runs through July 15th, and the public installation will be up through Summer 2023 in Green Mountain Falls, CO.
Featured Article
Title: Lightworks
Subtitle: Artist Brenda Biondo Brings Open Skies to Green Mountain Falls, Colorado.
Article Text: Before reimagining the world around her, Brenda Biondo's job was to document it. The roots of the Colorado-based artist trace back to the worlds of journalism and communication, wherer the native New Yorker often wrote about the environmental issues that would later color her photography practice.
"It just didn't feel like the right focus for me. I wanted to look at the landscape in a really different way," she says. "So I started doing a lot of experimenting when I began to focus on photography-and that is also one of the reasons I moved to Colorado, because of the landscape, the quality of light here, and the big sky."
That combination of creative restlessness and natural grandeur have guided Biondo's work as a visual artist over the last two decades. It's especially true of her Paper Skies and Moving Pictures series, where she pushes traditional photography techniques into the realm of abstraction by re-photographing manipulated images of the heavens-moody dishwasher clouds, brilliant blue expanses, and close-ups of bruise-colored sunsets- against the backdrop of the "real" thing.
Biondo's fascination with the big canvas above will get the large-scale treatment this summer, when she takes over the Lake Street display in Green Mountain Falls, Colorado, as a featured artist during the 2023 Green Box Arts Festival. The annual multi-disciplinary Front Range celebration takes place June 30 through July 15.
The artist's upcoming public work Open Skies employs techniques similar to those of her previous series, using the medium of photography as a launching pad to explore new ways of seeing the world. The project was partly inspired by the Green Mountain Falls Skyspace installation by Light and Space movement pioneer James Turrel, located just ten minutes from Biondo's home in the nearby town of Manitou Springs.
"I wanted to create a work that referenced Skyspace in some way," she says. "So by layering fourteen different images of the sky, all taken in Colorado over the last few years, in a way that gives an impression of looking through one sky to another sky, it gives you a [new] feeling. It's reality, but it's also surreal at the same time. You think about things in a different way. You experience things in a different way."
Written by Jezy J. Gray for ARTDESK Magazine, 2023.
