Subjective Objective - Brittan Rosendahl's Portfolio

MFA Thesis Exhibition titled Subjective Objective 04-06 to 04-15.

Carroll Gallery. Tulane University. New Orleans, LA.

Projects of the last two years respond to prevailing conditions of dated reference material. The impetus to my creative action was an encounter with a photographic information system emptied of its vitality. A yearbook from Tulane University, dating to 1994, and a volume of the Encyclopedia Britanica 9th edition, produced from 1870 to 1890, function here as material and conceptual threshold. In both cases, the source materials that caught my attention were systems of pictorial data and text. In their original state, these objects were provided as objective data; reference material valued for its certainty and historical accuracy. I encountered the yearbook disregarded, abandoned, left in my Tulane studio by a former tenant. The encyclopedias were in disrepair, replaced by a century of history, hidden in a dirty garage.

The title to this exhibition, Subjective Objective, speaks to my intuitive reaction or reactivation. Material concerns and composition necessitate a rare opportunity to interpret printed matter as a malleable independent language, a subjective form. Such actions open concrete definitions to secondary unfixed interpretations, all the while offering the viewer an optically specific resource. My decisions both highlight and activate a data set depleted of historical priority, limited by its general condition. Contextual displacement, disparate grouping, and literal restructuring are the methods I employ to achieve such activation.