Dillon Bryant with See-Zeen

We love seeing what our midwest nice artists are up to! Dillon Bryant was interviewed and featured in the new volume of See-Zeen. ✨ Dillon has been featured in nice;01;02;03, the hazards, no place like home, and a fervent and necessary arrangement. View the entire interview at See-Zeen.

About Dillon’s series, No Place But Here

No Place But Here is an ongoing investigation that uses collage and other constructed photographs to play with and against familial and broader narratives of power, control, and connection associated within the American West. Underpinned and intersected by interior questions revolving around ambiguity, artifice, illusion, legibility, and queerness, I focus my inquiry on sites now known as the Colorado Desert in California, and the Black Hills that span South Dakota and Wyoming. These lands possess complex histories of mining and my working process is influenced by a similar visual language colored by concealment, control, and extraction. Beneath the surface of how western lands are looked at and used, the work intersects with my relationship (or lack of one) to relatives and ancestors, using photography as an extended hand back in time to make sense of cycles of inheritance and foreclosed histories. Sifting through archives for materials to reproduce, cut, interlayer, prop up, and redact, I create ephemeral collages and tableaux stage sets fixed through the intervention of a camera. While I am unable to resurrect relationships or histories, the camera allows me to open a generative and critical space in service of an alternative. The resulting collages, montages, and photographs assembled from the strata of images act as vessels for the absurdity and contradictions left in the wake of grief and current day ruins.