My art practice incorporates photography, video, installation, and music, and is often grounded in archival research. I use cameras and montage techniques to create still and moving images of fictional objects and places, tell stories, pose questions, stage illusions, and intervene in historical narratives. By suturing multiple images together – leaving the seams visible either literally, through montage, or through the way in which the images are contained within larger narrative structures – I remind the viewer that the space of a photograph (or other lens based image) is always a kind of construction.
I studied European Art Song and Opera when I was young, and sang the repertoire of mad opera heroines and other “weak” 19th century female characters. This led me to become interested in how mad heroines embody cultural anxieties about femininity, power, and irrationality. In response, I created the installations Lucia and Ophelia, which incorporate early 20th century opera recordings and primitively projected transparencies based on archival images of opera singers.
An operatic aria also provides the impetus for the video installation “I attempt from love’s sickness to fly, in vain”. In the video a singer and viola di gamba player appear to be caught in an architectural structure which transforms and morphs around them while they repeatedly perform the title aria. The video’s structure mimics the psychological dilemma of being trapped, as well as the “da capo” form of the aria, which allows it to be extended and looped, infinitely.
My ongoing project The Natalie Brettschneider Archive grew out of a search for historical precedents for my interdisciplinary practice as a visual artist and a singer. While researching women active in the DADA movements in Paris and Zurich, I became interested in how the interdisciplinary work of female artists/ performers such as Emmy Hennings and Claude Cahun were represented, and how the narratives being written about these artists and their work have evolved over time.
Brettschneider gives me an alibi to enter into, mimic, or at times disrupt, the evolving narrative conventions of art histories that omit, minimize, or recuperate the contributions of women. Twenty five years after I began The Natalie Brettschneider Archive, it continues to evolve in response to emerging debates within feminist art history. The story of Brettschneider provides a kind of frame narrative, through which I weave real local histories – encouraging the viewer to question how histories are formed, what ideologies they support, and who they leave out.
In 2022 I released the LP ‘The Natalie Brett Quartet’, which mixes free improvisation with jazz standards, in a rather non-standard way. With Clyde Reed on bass, Lisa Cay Miller on piano, and Kenton Loewen on drums. You can listen to the record and watch the videos for it on the Natalie Brett Quartet page of this website. You can also purchase LPs and digital versions, on bandcamp here.