Brenda Biondo: Sun to Earth

"Brenda Biondo’s photography engages the natural world, specifically Colorado’s Front Range and West Texas, both high desert ecologies. Her work is unexpected, denying us the grand vistas to which we’ve grown accustomed in traditional landscape photography. This genre, as it was conceived by the likes of Ansel Adams and Edward Weston (and as it is still practiced today) is largely indebted to the tradition of European and U.S. landscape painting. Which is to say, it aims to mimic and enhance, even exceed, the perception of the human eye. It uses the illusion of one-point perspective to yield a sense of depth, foreground and background to translate a three-dimensional space into a two-dimensional one. Biondo offers us something entirely different. Her work embraces fragmentation, atmosphere, and time, evoking all that is imperceptible through what is seen."

— Katja Rivera, Curator of Contemporary Art, Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center at Colorado College

"By juxtaposing tumbleweed with native grass and plant life, Biondo acknowledges the complicated and still unfolding histories that brought these species into contact with one another. Not to be disregarded is the way Biondo’s composition subtly inverts the power dynamic. No longer is native flora fending off the threat of an invasive species, it encompasses and radiates from it (and yet still coexists with it) instead. The work is a celebration of landscape that also points to an entanglement between people and plants, the result of centuries of movement. Prairie Wheels do not replicate an expansive vista that enhances human vision. Instead, it mimics the form of the eye itself—the central image the pupil and the outer ring the iris—able to look simultaneously into the past, present, and future."

— Katja Rivera