For more than twenty-five years, Carmel-based artist Jean Brenner has traveled the world with the goal of experiencing traditional culture, as she puts it, “before it disappears under the rising tide of T-shirts and tennis shoes.” For Brenner, her art is a way to connect with people as she earns their willingness to be photographed. It is also a means of bridging the worlds of her viewers and those of her travels.
Complicating Brenner's project are the significant impediments her viewers face in crossing that bridge. We see Brenner's subjects multiply removed: frozen in time, mediated through her camera, produced by her tourist gaze. Those limitations are augmented by the one-way directionality of the viewer's engagement with those subjects. And yet, we do see more than we otherwise might of places far from our own both culturally and geographically. Brenner's work introduces us to a world that she has been fortunate enough to visit, and in the conspicuously limited scope of that introduction, we come to appreciate the distance between seeing and knowing.
On display here are two strains of Brenner's photographic work. Taken in India in 1995, the collages serve as studies for her colorful watercolors and demonstrate her interest in traditional women's work. The intimate portraits were taken on her more recent travels through Asia and western Africa. Brenner is currently at work on a series of photographic portraits of Islamic women.