Brett Swenson makes sculptures and videos that explore the felt mechanics of seeing and perceiving. He’s particularly interested in the sticky relationship between surfaces and interiors, and in how these elements can physically rework each other to create new and relationally expressive forms. Drawing from a longstanding interest in the complexity of human-environmental interactions, his works often respond directly to materials, technologies, or places that muddy the distinctions between nature and artifice, chaos and control.
His current work thinks about domesticity and the boundaries of a cultural ‘middle’– bringing 'normalcy' into visibility and therefore into question as the expectations and gray areas of daily middle-class experience are made visceral and strange.
BFA in Glass from the Rhode Island School of Design (2010)
MFA from the University of Chicago (2020)