ARTIST PROFILE
Tamara Brantmeier is an artist living in St. Paul, Minnesota. She is a professor of art at the University of Wisconsin-Stout.

NEW SEASON
My artistic practice examines the weight we carry and the journeys we are on. My paintings and drawings are composed of personal symbols recognizing place, weather, and symmetry as representations of identity, trauma, loss, and modalities of healing. I aim to imbue the work with imagery and tactility in hopes of eliciting a sense of melancholy, recognition, recognition, and shared experiences. I see interconnected relationships across the Midwestern landscape, and I aim to evoke a sense of identity and the familiar, of growth cycles and systems, and nature and seasons, tethering together facets of living through challenging experiences and moving towards healing much like living through a Midwestern winter in anticipation of spring.

The mirrored imagery of tree branches and root systems on the canvas painting diptychs are intended to invite a sense of curiosity or wonder; they also directly reference bilateral stimulation of EMDR therapy and the ink blots of Rorschach tests. These layered images reflect nature-based and psychological practices which positively impact our well-being and help us understand other types of cycles and systems.

The orange-red under paintings blanketed in impasto and dry brushed whites and tonal grays functions as metaphor for concealment, transformation, and paradox...I aim for the sensation of the familiar-yet-overlooked. Winter marks the end of one season and beginning of the next, yet winter also symbolizes death & struggle, renewal & rebirth, and transience, as well as hope, rest, and recovery. The physicality of the large-scale dimensions and the consciously tactile surface treatments invite a viewer to experience a composition as a portal or world.

Snow tacitly transforms the landscape in a simultaneously peaceful and brutal manner; returning beauty and order to the harvested fields and bringing nutrients and protection to the seeds of native plants. Snow represents peace, purity, and light; as well as fmelancholy, death, and immense silence.