Each year, BRIC, the leading presenter of cultural programming in Brooklyn, awards twelve fellowships through its Contemporary Art and Media Education programs. The fellowship offers recipients several key resources, including access to camera equipment, studios, and editing suites, as well as free enrollment in any course offered by BRIC’s Media Education program. In 2018, B&H was proud to sponsor the fellowship as part of its continued support of Brooklyn-affiliated artists and creators everywhere. I had the opportunity to speak with one of the fellowship recipients, Sarah E. Brook, about her time as a fellow, her work, and what the experience meant to her.
How important was BRIC’s Media Arts Fellowship program in terms of getting your film made?
Sarah E. Brook: I can definitely say that the film wouldn't have happened without BRIC and the Fellowship. The technical support and training, as well as access to equipment were essential—I was coming into the Fellowship with zero video experience. As always, it was also tremendously helpful to have a goal and a deadline. I loved the year-long structure of the fellowship—it provided a big-enough container for experimentation and play, but kept me on track toward completing a project. It was also great to connect with the other fellows for mutual brainstorming and support!
Photographs © Sarah E. Brook
If you had to single out one positive aspect of the fellowship—or BRIC in general—what would it be?
SEB: The staff and the organization itself, and its respect for artists. Their particular blend of professionalism and care.
Talking about your film, And so made into hammer into light, 2018. Could you talk about how it came to be? Was there a particular inspiration or guiding principle behind it?
SEB: I'll start by including my artist statement here, then talk about how I extrapolated from that into video.
My sculptures and installations engage both internal and external expanses, exploring how vastness can dismantle limiting narratives of being. I grew up in the Nevada desert, a geography that offers the now radical opportunity to experience the self as governed by geological time/space, not sociocultural time/space. I placed myself within that expanse often, as a way to meet gender and queer identities that didn’t fit within my community. This biography threads through my work.
My pieces oscillate between objects and perceptual experimentation. Using materials that evoke the stripped-down, distilled and bare qualities of the desert, I utilize translucency, layering, color gradients and architectural references to explore the relationship between expansive external and internal space. Raw and painted fields meet sculptural/structural gestures in a continuous juxtaposition of the expansive with the particular. Some works are spare self-portraits, renderings of simplified, uncategorized being, known through vast ground.
Each installation offers multiple angles of alignment, suggesting that a viewer find their own resonant physical, perceptual and psychical orientation to a piece within and through its environment. I want my work to be felt externally by a body in space as it’s felt internally by the psyche, creating a kind of metaphysical proprioception. I favor a human scale and strive to be generous, offering viewers multiple points of entry. This generosity is ultimately a transgressive act, relocating the power of identification within the individually-defined experience of the self.
I decided to apply to the Media Arts Fellowship while on residency at Jentel, in Wyoming. I was installing temporary works in the high-desert plains there that were contingent upon angles of light and my own orientation in space (as a generator of particular perspective). My own motion was a constant part of my process, and I started to take note of it in a different way. I started imagining what might be possible if I could depict my own process of moving around and through my work in light and landscape, and video was a natural next step. When I'm creating these temporary desert installations I'm thinking about ways to claim light in space; about simultaneous assertion and integration of gesture into landscape as a way to access those internal and external experiences of expanse. I'm also thinking about embodied experiences of gender and queer identity—the ways certain positions and movements align my body/psyche in space via the lenses of installations and the delineations of landscape and horizon. The text in the film narrates/describes the experience of building my own self into being (psychologically, emotionally, symbolically through these physical installations), oftentimes against dominant structures that would define me in ways that limit my capacities for growth, for transformation, for light.
I find an artist’s workflow—everything from concept to the actual grind of doing the work—to be fascinating. Can you talk a little bit about yours? I’m also curious if BRIC helped that process.
SEB: I started just experimenting with video and trying not to censor or edit any intuition—I did a lot of filming of my moving shadow interacting with different urban landscapes. I made a short film in an afternoon in this way and surprised myself with a desire to narrate the meaning of what was happening. The desire for language stuck with me through to the final film. My original proposal involved creating a movement-based response to a public sculpture I installed in Riverside Park this year, which was also a collaboration with 26 queer poets. That did make it into the film, but I also realized early on that I'd need to also get some desert footage if I wanted to make a film that felt true. I ended up using footage from a spring trip to Death Valley and some earlier experimental footage from prior residencies to flesh out the piece. The language went through countless edits, mostly hammered out on residency at SPACE on Ryder Farm. That was great—I needed a bracketed time away to really steep in the feel of the words, relate them properly to the images, and make sure I was as spare and clear as possible.
Lastly, now that you’re a Media Arts Fellow, do you think you would recommend the BRIC Fellowship to other artists?
SEB: Absolutely. It was an incredible way to translate my creative practice into a new medium. The technical support and training, as well as the access to equipment and community was the ideal container to experiment and challenge myself.
To see more of Brook’s work, visit her website, or check out her Instagram. You can also view her film, And so made into hammer into light, 2018 here.
If you would like to learn more about BRIC, the Media Arts Fellowship programs, or any of the cultural goings-on in Brooklyn, be sure to check out their website.
