Brandon De Sha is an American photographer and visual artist born imn Creve Couer, Missouri in 1991 and raised in Florissant. In 2015, he received his AFA in Photography from Saint Louis Community College - Florissant Valley. In 2016, De Sha received a full tuition scholarship to attend Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design (MIAD) where he went on to pursue a BFA in New Studio Practice. Scott Zieher discovered De Sha as he was completing his degree at the MIAD and we are thrilled to now present his international debut solo exhibition. The collages and digital interventions of Brandon De Sha infuse found and sourced images of the past with renewed urgency, subverting social constructs by way of gestures that remove context and reconstruct narrative with inquisitive sensitivity.

Interview with Brandon De Sha.

By way of introduction, tell us a bit about your background.

I was born and raised in Saint Louis, Missouri. I went to Florissant Valley Community College where I got my AFA in photography in 2016. From there I got a Full tuition scholarship from Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design where I received my BFA in New studio practice in 2018. Currently I teach photography at Florissant Valley Community College and live in my hometown of Florissant. I use collage, straight photography, and other mediums to explore a variety of topics such as community, representation and identity.

When I first encountered your work, the focus was on perceptions of Black bodies. For this show your lens is a bit different. Can you elaborate on the shift? 

Absolutely. That work made at MIAD during my senior thesis was as you said focused on black bodies. I took what I was doing in my earlier work with my self portrait series of collaging and photographing my own body during my time at Florissant Valley and applied those techniques to appropriated imagery of black people found through internet searches of archives.

That work focused on producing large scale collages that physically deconstructed  tropes and negative imagery of black people to make something completely different altogether that made viewers uncomfortable.

The shift from that work happened  because once I graduated from MIAD, I almost immediately lost access to resources needed to continue the project like having a studio  space and more importantly large scale printers capable of printing what I needed, so I put it on hold for the time being.

Moving back to Saint Louis after school, I decided to still try to make collages even if I didn’t have those specific  resources. I decided to seek out books, magazines, negatives and prints and make the physical print be the final result instead of scanning the collages and printing them on a massive scale.

The thing that's also influenced this shift and I’m sure you have seen too is that there’s an extreme lack of representation for black people in vintage vernacular that exists in the form of physically tangible prints. I had a much easier time finding this source material online as jpegs and the rare tiff, rather than as physical material I could buy. 

There’s obviously Jet and Ebony magazines but those are hard to find in decent shape and most people want quite a  bit of cash for something sight unseen. So with that in mind, I decided to focus on a few different things thematically in my collage work presently in the solo show. One thing I realized I could focus on for example was the narrative of whiteness. 

The school yearbook portraits and Nashville musicians for example. One thing about whiteness that persisted in the historical vernacular of photography at least as someone who is viewing these photographs from the perspective of a black person formally trained in photography and understanding the historical aspects of white supremacy that erases  indigenous cultures and oppresses these marginalized peoples  with its own its conformity. Whenever I made these collages in particular, there’s just conformity to the exact same haircut, or smile or even clothes. I play with that and try to bring that eeriness to the front of the conversations through the layering of collage.

Had the last year and a half of unrest and fear influenced your practice in any way?

Yes and no. I think as an artist who’s black, my work has sort of always been political and about thematically exploring ideas of identity and representation. I’ve had a lot of shitty encounters that  moulded me as a person and an artist. 

Those experiences range from getting a beer bottle thrown at me as a child by an adult, being called the N-word by another student as a child, being followed by store clerks, and cops harassing me for no reason at all while driving or taking photographs. 

Making art is my way of channeling all my rage at those manifestations of white supremacy into  something physical that quite literally destroys the cannon of it all and exercising demons at the same time. I think those experiences made me just hate authority figures and this is my fuck you to  the powers that be.

With the pandemic, there is definitely a hesitance to sort of go out and photograph in the normal way. I'm still trying to reconcile how to factor that risk factor in terms of straight photography. The experience of making collages is completely different compared to that. Everything I need is located within a studio space and the world is mine to create rather than document with an 8x10 camera. Both are similar in that I consider them introspective practices that maintain social awareness.

I’m interested in your technique in the studio. For instance, the Botticelli paintings that seemed to spark a whole series. Are there specific things about an image or source material that draw you to it? 

My technique varies from piece to piece. With source material, I’m definitely always on the lookout for things that not only thematically touch on what I want to explore but also has the compositions that can be juxtaposed with other subjects on top, blended, or beneath it. The thing I’ve learned through collage making is that different image combinations have different messages so I love when I have multiples to see what messages can be made with a different cut or tear.

Sometimes I’ll have a concept of a collage in my head but not have the right source materials. For example, the collage of Whistlejacket by George Stubbs. I found a cutout reproduction of that painting about three years ago through the material for the arts in New York when I was in the New York Studio Residency Program. I always wanted to collage it, but didn’t know how to ‘activate’ it in a way so to speak. 

When I flew out to Nashville I brought it with me in my suitcase full of collage material, but knew I wanted it bigger. Since I had the resources this time around I printed it bigger And completed the previsualized concept and it worked out exceptionally well. I used to keep art journals when I first started making art and draw out compositions I had in my head, currently all previsualization is just in my head but I highly suggest any artist carry a journal. I only got to that point because of journaling. 

With the Botticelli collages, I’ve had the concept of using paintings to create collages in my head for years and originally planned on doing a series of Rembrandt collages, when I made them with Rembrandt I wasn’t particularly fond of them and went back to the drawing board. The book of Botticelli had more flexibility in terms of paper quality and details of paintings which worked out in my favor.

How does your background in photography inform the collage practice? 

I think my formal photography training I acquired in school informs my collage practice in a few ways. The biggest influence is composing an image. You need this for any medium before you break the rules in my opinion.The beautiful thing about collage is that anyone can make one from anything, you can go into a library or thrift store and walk out with at least one good one. Unfortunately,  in my opinion  most  art, especially collages suffer from being incoherently structured. Having a formal background lets me structure that chaos with intent. I also pride myself on craftsmanship. Having art teachers like Janice Nesser-Chu, Jon Horvath, Kim Miller, Peter Barrickman, even a workshop I did with Joel Sternfeld  throughout the years to critique me on that alone helped me iron out details throughout my art practice as a whole. My formative years were at community college with Jan and every mentor after her like the above  has kept me humble and eager to learn more and push the boundaries of the medium.

The show run through July 3, 2021. The gallery is open by appointment and open hours may be listed on Instagram.