Dillon Bryant

Dillon Bryant (b. Spearfish, SD) is an artist working between Northwest Arkansas and the upper American Midwest employing an expanded photographic practice to explore constructions of home, mythologies, and the American West. Bryant has participated in exhibitions and performances across the United States and abroad, including the Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, the Czong Institute for Contemporary Art, FilterSpace, OH!klahomo, the Washington Pavilion of Arts and Sciences, the Momentary, and the Colorado Photographic Arts Center. Bryant’s work has been featured on Lenscratch, Dek Unu Magazine, Der Greif, Dovetail Magazine, and Float Magazine. Bryant holds a BFA from the University of South Dakota, has taken graduate courses at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and is currently pursuing an MFA at the University of Arkansas.

Artist Statement: I use collage and other constructed photographs to play with and against certain narratives associated with the American West. My practice is underpinned by interior questions revolving around ambiguity, artifice, illusion, legibility, lineage, queerness, and the western landscape. I focus my inquiry on personally significant sites in places now known as the Colorado Desert in California, and. the Black Hills of South Dakota and Wyoming, regions possessing complex histories and entanglements of mining. My working process is informed by visual languages of concealment, control, extraction, and mimicry I have internalized from these regions. I sift through found and self authored archives and photographs for materials to cut, duplicate, interlayer, prop up, and redact to create ephemeral collages fixed through the intervention of a camera. Montaged jackalopes, fish, rattlesnakes, and other silhouettes are props and actors in constructed tableaus and landscapes. By staging the strata of images before a lens, I attempt to open a generative space in service of alternative mythologies. The resulting montages and photographs act as vessels for the absurdity and contradictions left in the wake of grief.