STATEMENT OF WORK

Brent Ridge operates in a land of abstraction rooted in appropriation, landscape, and post-industrial aesthetics. His varied processes of creation reflect on what it means to be a contemporary artist in today’s world of multi-faceted experience of space and time. Using experimental image formation, representational shapes are stripped naked of their earthly bindings to float in new arrangements of a post-industrial world.

His works of painting, drawing, printmaking, and collage work with repetition from found industrial patterns produced by print or weaving. Painting on raw recycled sheets from thrift stores is the basis of the artist’s so-called linen and core creative practice. He uses the appropriated fabric patterns as the background and foreground; sometimes obscuring this evidence all-together but also extending these pattern forms to drawing on printed patterns through printmaking and collage.

His work makes loose associations with the landscape for its metaphorical value, as he equates our inherited vacancy of the post-industrial landscape with an opportunity for renewal, much like the process of painting and creating collage. In the development of his works, there is often sketching and cut-and-paste strategies imitating digital manipulation that is evidenced by the hard edges of the sewn and painted spaces. These post-modern twists that use the play of positive/negative space by reworking earlier designs raise new aesthetic questions by invoking a limitless sequence of manufacture and design. 

Brent Ridge was born and raised in Flint, MI, USA. He has held solo shows in East Lansing, MI, New York, NY, and Glasgow, UK. He now resides in the rolling hills of the Berkshires in Massachusetts. He loves to share his enthusiasm for expressive labor and transcendent transformations with the world.