For her new new exhibition, artist Brittany Brooke Crow turned her camera on herself, tearing photos printed on Hahnemühle Pearl paper and rearranging the pieces. Test Stripping — on display through May 5 at The LiFT bar in Des Moines’ Court Avenue District — depicts Crow’s battles with her fear of intimacy and vulnerability by exposing herself to the camera and her body, building a personal relationship, and putting it up on display.
“I think because of some other feedback I got from the work, I wanted to force people to see the work differently,” Crow said of the images she shot for Test Stripping. “I didn’t want them to necessarily grasp onto my full image. I was really interested in abstracting that image and still playing with parts of my body and the source imagery.”
“But I really was interested how, by simply just taking a photograph and tearing it up into even strips, taking those strips from multiple photographs and rearranging them, how that would change the entirety.”
Crow also has an interest in repurposing art — mainly because printing is expensive, but also to take the work into new territory. For Test Stripping, she used a combination of newly taken photographs and photographs from a previous exhibition called Exhibition(ist), held at the OL Guild.
The overall idea comes from her training in film photography with large- and medium-format cameras at the University of Northern Iowa, where she earned a bachelor’s in fine art in photography.
“When you’re in a dark [room] enlarging a photograph and you’re trying to get the exposure right, you put your film in the enlarger and you have your light sensitive photo paper, and you always have to dial up the exposure for that actual paper,” Crow said. “Test stripping” is a method used in photography to find out the correct amount of light exposure, in short adjusting the brightness and darkness of a photograph.
“Without the access to a dark room, I kind of was inspired by that strip of the photo and that’s how I came to the idea of stripping my actual prints in such a way and focusing on that strip as a motif,” Crow said, adding that “motif” isn’t quite the right word. “I like the repetition of that form. The form of the test strip was really interesting to me and having that same form repeated over and over again with those fragments of images.”
Crow is a solo artist and wants to make sure people know that.
“When looking around the show at the LiFT after I hung it, I knew one missing piece was, OK, I want to make sure people know it’s self-portraiture,” she explained. “I want to make sure people make that connection, ’cause I think once someone understands that it isn’t some woman that I photographed, it’s myself in all the photographs, this is all me, it completely recontextualizes it.”
If the model happened to be a different person, Crow believes the meaning of Test Stripping would change. “It means something very different than if I was going about that idea of, ‘oh, I have a muse. I’m photographing this one person.’ No, no! It’s myself. And I’m interested in that idea of being in front of the camera and behind the camera,” Crow said passionately.
The reason Crow chose Hahnemühle Pearl paper is because she was fascinated by photographic artist Molly Woods’ use of the paper. Crow recalls some work of Woods’ that featured poisonous botanicals and some square format photography.
She asked Woods what paper she used to print when the pair worked together at Beeline and Blue, a commercial printer in Des Moines. Fortunately, Beeline and Blue decided to bring in Hahnemühle Pearl paper.
“As soon as I found out that that paper was available, I was like, ‘Oh yeah! I have to get it.'”
The pieces in her exhibition have quite simple, descriptive titles, such as Self, torn in four.
“Each one is saying ‘this is me, and this is how many strips I used for this work.’ I tend to have this conflict with titling my work. Sometimes I’ll really go all in and play with the titles, but I also tend to be really tempted to title everything ‘Untitled.’ And this is that weird in between where I said, OK, We’re going say ‘self.’ We’re going to make sure people know this is [a] self portrait and we’re going to do a simple descriptor and just start there. And we’re going to give it a title but it’s also nontitled.”
The main title of her exhibition plays with innuendo. “When I was thinking about the concept for this show and the test strip, I was really interested in playing with that innuendo again. Because Test Stripping, it can refer to the fact that I am naked in all of my images, I’m photographed in the nude form. But it can also refer to the idea of stripping the paper focusing on the form of the test strips.”
Crow said the strips add to the “rhythm of the space” inside The LiFT. Before putting everything up, the strips were hanging in her Mainframe Studios space on stark white walls.
“Seeing the work come off my white walls and then go into this really dimly lit bar — which I love about the LiFT, I love how dim it is — and seeing that work on a colored wall … I think it adds this roughness to it. It’s way easier to see the torn edges and I got really excited about that. I think the work reads very differently in that space than it did in my studio.”
Crow has a true passion for test stripping and knows her next challenge with this form of photography will be to get comfortable with more ruggedness. She likes the clean rips in Test Stripping, but said she is ready to “make a big mess.”
“These are still really clean. I like a lot of control over my work, and I feel like my tendency for that control and for that perfection is coming out a lot in this,” she said when pointing to the portraits used in Test Stripping. She said she’s trying to push herself to let go of that control, but laughs and added, “It’s taking steps.”
In addition to creating works, Crow has contributed to the Iowa’s art scene through teaching, managing art galleries and art residencies. Crow is one of the artist fellows for the Iowa Arts Council from July 1, 2021 to June 30, 2022. This year, her art career has been partially financially supported by the Iowa Arts Council through funding from the National Endowment for the Arts.
“I’m sad it’s coming to an end, but it’s been a really good year for me to step back and reassess what I’m capable of, [and] what I need to pursue art as a career,” she said.
After the fellowship ends, Crow plans to take a break from being a part-time adjunct professor at Grandview University to follow her dreams of making a living with art and gig work like she has done in the past with event photography. She hopes to document artists of all kinds in hopes of getting them similar opportunities.
Test Stripping will be on display until May 5 at the LiFT, 222 4th St, Des Moines. The business is open 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., Monday through Friday.
You can also catch Crow at the 2022 Meet the Artist Series via Zoom on April 28 at 12 p.m. Registration required.
