BIO
Jacklyn Brickman is an interdisciplinary artist and educator whose work entangles science fact with fiction to address social and environmental concerns by employing natural entities, processes, and technology. Her work spans installation, video, and performance, with a special interest in cross-disciplinary collaboration and social engagement. Fellowships include The National Academy of Sciences, Chaire arts et sciences, Jentel Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, and Erb Family Foundation. She has exhibited her work internationally. Brickman resides in Kalamazoo, Michigan, the ancestral and contemporary territory of the Council of the Three Fires – the Ojibwe, the Odawa, and the Potawatomi. Indigenous nations of the Great Lakes region are also known as the Anishinaabe. She is an Assistant Professor of Kinetic Imaging at Western Michigan University.
STATEMENT
As an interdisciplinary artist, my work explores the relation-making between people and their environments through large-scale installation, performance, and moving images. Environments might range from immediate urban landscapes, and municipal land, to wilderness. My practice is rooted in the observation and examination of natural forms (especially plants) and their processes as a means of understanding, drawing similarities, and speculating possibilities for the future. I use instruments and programs ranging from optical lenses to digital imaging to compare and blur the natural and fantastical through sculpture, installation, performance, video, animation, collaboration, and viewer engagement.
Endeavors through which I have explored this human/environment relationship have taken various forms, ranging from large mylar inflatable spheres that expand and contract their breadth in a movement of timed inflation installed in a biological sciences greenhouse to my current endeavor, The Department of Planetary Futures, which is a fictional entity through which multispecies collaborative experiments are employed to investigate the interrelationships humans have with other life forms and one another. At the heart of these endeavors is a desire to connect to the surrounding world and its organisms with care and humility; to learn from, engage with, and speculate possible livable futures.
My recent work, Cossettes, was an immersive multimedia exhibition exploring sugar beet processing. Named after the V-shaped slices used in sugar extraction, the installation was comprised of macro and microscopic documentation combined with archival cultivation footage projected on processing material. A biofeedback sensor and modular synthesizer sourced human and beet entangled biodata into a sonic environment. The performance aspect included sugar extraction methods that yielded beet pulp paper and beet sugar candy. The overall experience incorporated sight, sound, taste, smell, live performance, and shared beet-derived candy to explore an essential central Michigan crop that holds economic, cultural, and regional significance.
I frequently collaborate with scientists, dancers, choreographers, musicians, and other artists as well as with the public to create works that are non-hierarchical and that engage and stimulate dialogue and cooperation. As the earth continues to change rapidly, my research will continue to revolve around how humans fit into, work with, and speculate their social and environmental relationships.