Bryanna Millis
Imagination of Salvation: Actions on the Land
April 5 – April 28, 2019
“One of the challenges of our time is that people feel disconnected from – perhaps even insensitive to – the world’s great problems…there is a huge gap between what we know and what we feel. How can we translate knowledge into action, and really change our behavior?…Only by embodying knowledge can we gain a sense of responsibility and commitment.”
– Olafur Eliasson
In Imagination of Salvation, Bryanna works with local partners from Al Azraq (the blue one), a former desert oasis in Eastern Jordan that has been decimated by 30 years of groundwater over-pumping and resource mismanagement. Through this work she seeks to create a visual lexicon to understand how mind, body, and heart-centered knowledge can lead us to overcome powerlessness and cynicism and take action for change.
This work is about dreams, and changing what we believe to be possible. Imagination of Salvation: Actions on the Land, begins that conversation, representing a time of getting to know the land, and thinking about its past, present, and possible future. The works include documentation of site-specific actions, mixed-media collage, poetry, and local memories in Arabic.
Maps here represent a visual form of data, or intellectual knowing, which are altered to see how they can become vehicles for deeper engagement and understanding of place. Actions on the land reflect embodied knowledge, or feeling, through interactions with heat, water, earth, stone, salt, and net. Other pieces address a third form of knowing, through the heart, and seek to understand how heart-centered knowledge can make us feel connected to the earth, to one another, to something larger than ourselves.
—
Bryanna Millis is a conceptual environmental mixed-media artist focusing on the linkages between heart and mind, feeling and intellect. Her work is situated within broader themes of place and time in the Middle East, and she uses cut paper, paint, thread, objects, and found materials to root esoteric concepts in concrete experiences of specific histories, present moments, and imagined futures. Bryanna has a Master’s degree in Development Economics from the Fletcher School at Tufts University, and a Bachelor’s degree in Communications and Fine Arts from the University of Pennsylvania. In 2019 she will attend the Athena Standards Residency in Athens, Greece. Bryanna lives and works in Washington, DC and Amman, Jordan.
