Bremner Benedict

American, born 1957

BiographyBremner Benedict was born in Massachusetts in 1957. After earning a Bachelor's degree at New York University, she earned a BFA at Western Washington University and continued her studies at the Maine Photographic Workshops and the Art Institute of Boston (at Lesley College). She has been a longtime Boston-area resident. Her work is most often engaged with issues of landscape and our perceptions over time.

The Center for Creative Photography in Tucson recently added a portfolio of the artist's work, from the series Gridlines, to the collection, and her work is also in the collections of the International Museum of Photography at George Eastman House in Rochester, New York; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; the Addison Gallery of American Art in Andover, Mass.; the Fogg Museum of Art at Harvard University; and others. Venues for her solo shows include The Print Center in Philadelphia; Gallery Kayafas in Boston; Texas Women's University in Denton, Texas; the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston; Northern Arizona Museum in Flagstaff; and the Hess Gallery at Pine Manor College in Chestnut Hill, Mass. Her work has been selected for numerous group and juried exhibitions -- including those at the Decordova Museum of Art and Sculpture, the Griffin Museum of Photography, and the Photographic Resource Center - by jurors such as Keith Carter, Deborah Martin Kao, Linda Connor, Allison Kemmerer, Olivia Parker, Judy Dater, Therese Mulligan, Alison Nordstrom, and Debra Klomp.

"My photography deals with the changing perspectives we have of landscape," the artist writes on her website. "I choose landscapes we often overlook or never encounter to expose the fractured logic that informs our experience of the natural world. We perceive the environment as a collection of stories chronicling the complex alliances and conflicts between nature and humanity." Her series Gridlines, from which these two works are drawn, began when the artist was driving in the Southwest. She noticed the sculptural qualities of the structures built to support power lines as they cross the landscape. "Vistas interrupted by these giant objects of strange sculptural beauty are irrevocably altered, unsettling the viewer's preconceptions of reality by unveiling patterns of beauty within a subject culturally regarded as ugly," she writes on her website about his body of work. Though the series now includes power structures from a range of locations, the two works acquired were both made in the Southwestern United States. Two Grey Hills is a trading post in northern New Mexico, in the Four Corners area, which lent its name to a style of Navajo weaving. Cedar Wash, Arizona, is located between Flagstaff and Tuba City.

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