Artists Against the Bomb opens Friday, October 16, 2026.
Artists Against the Bomb opens Friday, October 16, 2026.
Can you talk about your background and what brought you to the UMOCA Residency?
I grew up in Utah, did my undergrad in Provo, and moved away to California for graduate school. When the pandemic came about I moved back home, like many, and found I didn’t have much direct connection to the art scene in Salt Lake. Applying to the UMOCA residency felt like a logical step to try and get to know people here and I was excited by the prospect of sharing a studio space with other interesting artists and people.
Can you talk a bit about the trajectory of your residency here at UMOCA? Where did you start and where are you now?
When I applied to the residency I was interested in playing with painting by using more sculptural mediums. The idea of wearing paintings was exciting to me, or putting them in landscapes & outside settings. That will still happen eventually, I’m sure, but when I got here I found that I really just wanted to focus on the 2D surface and get better at making images with oil paint. Each piece in the show was started a year ago, and all year I worked on them consistently, just seeing where they would go with so much painting time.
In your AIR Space show Messages From Fish, the ideas you’re exploring—underwater optics, color theory, and loss—at first seem disparate, but your paintings somehow manage to combine them in a way that feels cohesive and resolved. Can you talk about how you started thinking about underwater optics and loss as ideas that could inform your paintings?
A few years ago I got scuba certified and was moved when the instructors explained color loss at depth. I had just experienced a serious loss in my family and must have felt that there was a connection there, because I stored that fact in spite of being in a generally frantic and disoriented state. Painting, for me, has had a consistent effect of revealing the context of impressions over time. Sometimes this happens through the images themselves, but more often from the act of painting, and sitting down to write about what just went on. While I was making these pieces and thinking about what they do together, that memory from scuba diving came through—how vision changes when you’re put in a foreign environment, no matter what you do to try and adapt to it. That’s been my experience with losing my brother. It feels like I’m living a different life with a different set of eyes and am constantly relearning how to use them.
It’s fascinating to read in your statement that “red is present [in your paintings] but only in mixtures,” to analogize the experience of seeing underwater. There’s a metaphorical purpose to this constraint, but do you also find that adding a parameter like this helps focus your work?
The constraint regarding color wasn’t intentional—when I limit my color palette it’s usually to help me break out of a habit rather than to fit under a conceptual blanket. There was a painting I was preparing for this show that started out completely red and gradually turned white. It didn’t end up fitting into this series by the time it was done, but it is interesting to me that my one attempt to confront a red composition head on got completely taken over.
The imagery in your paintings, while not always immediately recognizable does have a strange familiarity—like viewing a familiar object through water or tears. Can you talk about how you chose your subject matter—pearls, seeds, rainbows, petals, sunsets. It’s all very natural, but not strictly aquatic.
Imagery from nature has always been in my work to some degree—the desert and ocean have inspired me for a long time. A lot of the images that keep repeating in these paintings have become personally symbolic; they loosely or directly relate to my brother Josh, who was an avid surfer and generally loved being outside. I paint intuitively, rarely with any kind of plan, but I think these motifs come up or repeat as a subconscious way of trying to see him, and I like how they become something else when they distort and interact with each other.
You mention in your statement that humans must use specialized tools to explore underwater environments. Do you see painting or art, more generally, as a kind of tool or adaptation that humans use to explore unknown or, even, unknowable things?
Art certainly has the ability to articulate impressions in a way that can be difficult to do with words. So much of what we experience can’t be said or measured (I’ll say that much about grief), and many artists are able to speak to those experiences through color, texture, sound, or some other sensory avenue. I guess in that way painting feels like putting on a diving mask—it can’t perfectly translate anything, but it can enable you to access certain impressions and identify the shared experiences that surface level communication can’t quite address.
It seems that because “memories change and fade,” these paintings could, in the future, serve as documents of the messages you were perceiving and decoding “from beneath” at this time. Are you interested in how your practice might be diaristic or serve as a log of your interests, thoughts, and feelings at a particular moment? If so, to what degree does this inform your work?
I wouldn’t say that I sit down to paint with the same intentions that I’d sit down to record a diary with. I do it to squish & scrub paint with my paintbrush, watch an image unfold – and I enjoy how the paint smells. It’s very sensory! However, I do think that more of my internal world has shown up in the paintings in the last few years than it ever has. This might have to do with the nature of recently losing a loved one, which, in my experience, has often left little room for intentions or plans in regards to artmaking. There’s a lot of need for processing and reacting, and maybe this is where the sensory experience with painting allows the interior to bleed out better than thinking does. In that way, I look at these last few bodies of work and see a timestamp for my interests & sensibilities at different points, and also a catalog of this constant and evolving relationship with loss.
What’s on the horizon for you as an artist?
I’d like to keep painting—I’m interested in getting better at creating images and understanding color. Making some painted sculptures, or revisiting making paintings that move will probably be on the horizon at some point.
Brooklynn's exhibition Messages From Fish is on view in the AIR Space through March 29, 2025. Learn more here. Sign up for updates!
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