Brenda Stumpf: 'Around Us Swirls Dust'

The mixed-media works of Brenda Stumpf in “Around Us Swirls the Dust” are archetypal and symbolic and came about through deep and somber introspection about memory, loss, loneliness, aging, and ultimately, death.

The title comes from a line in The Book of Poverty and Death, the third book in Rainer Maria Rilke’s Book of Hours.

The artist had purchased tiny black and white photographs from a second-hand store and then scrawled and scratched into the faces and backgrounds with a razor blade. These altered photographs were completed pieces in their own right, but Stumpf chose to take them into another incarnation through an image transfer process. She digitally captured the small scratched works, enlarged and laser printed them in small sections, and transferred the images with a gel medium onto plexiglass mounted to wood panels. The light passing through the semi-transparent image and transparent acrylic sheets creates a milky- looking surface invoking a dream-like or apparitional quality to the lacerated and obscured figures. – Brenda Stumpf