Arden Bendler Browning
Gallery Affiliations: Bridgette Mayer Gallery
Region: Northeast
Neatly organized and frozen moments are not real. Experience is messy: overlapping reflections and memories cloud the present and are muddled by competing background noises. Cities encompass a wide range of progress and collapse within their landscapes. Time seems to move in extremes as well: abandoned properties may sit forever, while other tracts of land are dug up and transformed seemingly overnight.
The speed of change—positive and negative—is exciting, chaotic, and disturbing. Contrasting histories are embedded in any single urban location. . . .A crime scene is also someone’s home and neighborhood; a construction zone is a mess that erases stories of the past and points to a fresh future.
My imagery is derived from the neighborhoods of Philadelphia I physically and virtually traverse, retrace, and reinvent. Google Maps street views counter my real experience of place, allowing me to jump through time and space. My abstracted, fleeting impressions correlate with the inherent distortions of Google’s blurry, low-resolution snapshots.