Cree Bruins

Artist Statement

The transition to digital photography has changed how we view our world and the pictures we are able to produce. It is within this framework that I play with common, often discarded or overlooked, materials of analog photographic production to consider new ways of creating images while bringing to light elements of space, time and memory.

Reflecting (Then and Now) is collaborative work with artist Sarah Hollis Perry. We have each worked throughout our careers extensively with film and alternate photographic technologies. Sarah worked for many years in the photo lab of Edwin Land at the Polaroid Corporation. I grew up in Rochester, New York and have a long family background with Eastman Kodak. With this show we came together, reusing the all-but-obsolete materials of earlier photographic production as our medium. We played with scale and repetition using 35mm, 120mm and SX-70 formats combined with mirrors common to both Kodak and Polaroid to develop the framework for our physical structures and resulting digital images.

Light has guided much of my work. In Light Of… was an installation made from color photographic gel filters on clear Plexiglas ledges that played with light, casting shadows and reflections on the wall to produce diffuse, spatial effects. Follow the Leader consisted of a sequence of twenty-four prints using discarded end leaders from processed 35mm film that had been partially exposed to light during the process of loading them into the camera. Hundreds of leaders were collected and sorted, then arranged, scanned, digitally captured, and converted to prints to assemble this series. I created the Drawn to Light series by intentionally exposing slide film to light, then chemically processing it to develop subtle palettes of color and pattern. These were then cut and collaged onto paper, and combined with watercolor paint and/or ink.

Using different approaches with the same materials, my work focuses on both a formal level, exploring the relationship between photography, painting and drawing, and on a more abstract level, addressing the movement in recent years from film to digital photography. In the formal approach, I guide the material to the image, whereas in the latter, the materials themselves reveal the image.

Artist Bio

Cree grew up in Rochester, New York, and has a long family background with Eastman Kodak, her father the Director of the Experimental Division for many years. While attending the School of Fine Arts, she started experimenting herself with the materials of film photography as a medium for sculpture, drawing and installations, now all-but-obsolete with the rapid and recent movement to digital.

Since graduating from SMFA in 2001, Cree has exhibited in numerous museums and galleries including Danforth Art Museum, deCordova Sculpture Park, Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Barbara Krakow, Sculptors Gallery and Mills Gallery. She has been the award recipient of a Museum of Fine Arts Traveling Fellowship, Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellowship in drawing, Blanche E. Coleman Award, St Botolph Grant-in Aid, Yousuf Karsh Prize and an Artadia Award finalist. Cree is currently a member of the Kingston Gallery in Boston.

Work available on Artsy