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 University of Pennsylvania
Where sculpture and photography meet.
Brent Wahl is a painter, a sculptor, and a video artist—but in the end, his work usually takes the form of a photograph. For “Tape and Wire” (left), he created a physical object, then captured it with careful technique on film. The effect is to disorient the viewer: We can clearly see how the subject has been constructed, but the absence of a setting and the flattening effect of the photograph combine to prevent us from gauging its size or depth. Indeed, Wahl is reluctant to discuss his creative process. All he will divulge about “Gleam” (right), for example, is that it was produced by projecting an image through a plastic material.
“I was a painter for years,” says Wahl, who also worked as a commercial and editorial photographer in New York before receiving his MFA from the University of Pennsylvania last year. “So I’m interested in the idea of building an image out of nothing.” Using a variety of techniques and materials, he creates his pieces entirely in the studio, shooting them with a 4x5 camera. Some works, like “Gleam,” don’t even exist as objects. Others, like “Tape and Wire,” start with intricate sculptures that may take months to create.
Yet Wahl, who now teaches undergraduate photo classes at UPenn, never exhibits these sculptures—only his photographs of them. In fact, after “living with them” for a while, he almost always destroys his creations. “I really like the idea of erasing the original and using the photography as a document,” he says.
—Miki Johnson
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