2023 BEST OF SHOW WINNER
TAMMY RENÉE BRACKETT : BUCK UP BUTTERCUP
SEPTEMBER 21ST - OCTOBER 26 2024
RECEPTION SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 21ST 5-7PM
PEG BOTHNER GALLERY
TRI-COUNTY ARTS COUNCIL
Tammy Renée Brackett: I am a scavenger who works with remnants of what is left behind. I employ traditional craft techniques used by my late mother and grandmothers while responding to the male-dominated deer hunting culture that surrounds me in Western New York. I confront traditional ideas of gender and identity via contrasts, contradictions, and idioms. Working with the skin of an animal affords a level of intimacy with both the animal and with death. I will never forget the feeling of holding a deer hide, fresh off the animal, for the first time. The weight of it—feeling the simultaneous presence and absence of the live animal—I was not prepared for it. Now, after skinning countless deer, I am still in awe of the power of a deer hide to speak of life and death, of individual and herd. As a hide becomes leather, the deer’s presence is replaced by a human presence. Many people are unaware that there was a time when the white-tailed deer was threatened by extinction due to the over harvesting of them for their hides. The hides used in these works were salvaged from people who hunt to feed their families and would have otherwise discarded them. Others came from deer who had been struck and killed by vehicles. Some of them I tanned myself. Others were tanned by Indigenous peoples in Canada.
Field of Questions
Where does a deer belong? In the woods, in the crosshairs, on the dinner table? It depends who you ask and where they’re standing at the time. The answer is always local. There are many more humans than deer in this country, but in some parts of the U.S., deer outnumber people. Tammy Renée Brackett lives in one of those places—Alfred, New York—and her work springs from the baseline fact that many of her neighbors are deer.
People and deer have a very long history together, not only of sharing space, but of being paired in a life-giving, death-bringing pas de deux. We have hunted them for millennia, and they have provided food, hides for clothing and shelter, bones and antlers for tools, sinew for bowstrings, even glue and insulation. They’ve sustained us and commanded our attention. Their charisma is due to their undeniable beauty but also to their importance in our lives.
These days, that importance often takes other forms—a small minority of Americans hunt deer, but many more of us watch them in our yards, feed them, try not to hit them on the road, rescue them from predicaments, chase them out of our gardens. Issues of habitat change and overpopulation are thorny and perennial. Around Tammy’s home, the hunting part of the relationship remains prevalent—an “orange army,” housed in hunting cabins, fans into the woods every fall. The hunters take with them equipment, of course, and they are also thickly swaddled in culture: lingo, tradition, camaraderie.
Where does a woman belong? I made a tentative foray into this conventionally male hunting world to research my book; I was lucky that I had my brother, and some cousins and an uncle, as guides. I also had no intention to actually hunt; I was just observing. Tammy has gone deeper. She’s taken a winding path that began with a love of spending time in the forest, continued on through the unexpected gift of a 16-gauge shotgun, brought her to a local hunter’s ed class to learn about turkey hunting (and to connect with her human neighbors), and eventually delivered her to the milestone of killing a deer. A friend taught her how to clean and quarter the deer on Thanksgiving Day. In the dozen years since then, she’s continued to hunt and she’s done something else that many hunters never do: she’s learned how to tan deer hides.
For many Indigenous groups in Turtle Island, hide-tanning was women’s work, a reciprocal partner to the mostly male task of hunting. Tanning is physically demanding, repetitive, time-consuming. It makes your body strong and it makes your mind patient. Whereas a deer hide was once highly valued for the clothing and shelter it could provide—and for a time, hides were the basis of a booming transatlantic trade in the early American colonies—in our industrialized world, hides are often simply thrown away or burned.
As for where a hide belongs, I feel certain that “in a landfill” is not a good answer, but Tammy’s work invites me to expand my notions of what a proper afterlife for a deer’s skin might be. The first time she held a hide, she told me, “It was heavier, more significant, more alive…It spoke about the animal. I will never forget the feeling of that.” Her work comes from this response; she starts with respect and awe. Then she begins to invent.
Like deer themselves, everything in this work of Tammy’s is more than one thing. Mylar, for example, is the grocery-store trash caught in the trees when people let birthday balloons float away, but it’s also a mirror, and it’s also water, and it’s also solar panels. Or look at the patterns laser-cut into the hides, juxtaposing a modern process with the earthiest of materials. The tiny rectangular holes, arranged into rows and columns, recall the architecture of the spreadsheet, or the map of Manhattan, or the front of a card catalog, or Jefferson’s grid superimposed on the landscape. But they also make a framework for Tammy to tie lengths of baling twine to the hide, recreating fur in the language of agriculture. Whereas the deer grew fur with no conscious work, this twine-fur must be painstakingly crafted, one piece at a time.
That kind of textile-adjacent, repetitive handwork—again, traditionally women’s work— shows up again in the tatting on the edges of more than one hide, tatting being a skill Tammy associates with her grandmother. Who in this world patiently weaves, knots, knits, stitches, and who makes sudden, singular, heroic gestures? Tammy does both. Most breathtaking to me in this body of work are the words she adds to some of the hides, making what she calls “idiom flags.” What language is right enough to be written on another’s skin?
This work finds some true words. It’s true that for a woman hunter, there might be voices within saying she should do things like a man if she wants to be successful. It’s true that hunters talk to each other sometimes in military language. It’s true that hunting, for as long as it’s been going on, has had the capacity to conflate human and animal in strange ways—some humans have dressed as deer to hunt deer; some humans see the bucks they kill as men with whom they are jousting.
This is a realm of paradox, exhilaration, and pain. I love how Tammy’s work steps into this risky field. In previous work, she’s projected images onto hides as though they were screens. That impulse, if not the exact technique, is still here. Deer are indeed a reflection of what we think and feel. They show us the questions we beam into the world. Where does a deer belong? Whose habitat is this? In all our knotty, animal longing, who are we?— Erika Howsare Erika Howsare is the author of the book, The Age of Deer: Trouble and Kinship with Our Wild Neighbors (2024)
About the artist: Tammy Renée Brackett creates work that poses epistemological questions regarding identity, categorization, and location. Her most recent work explores the complex relationships between humans and animals, particularly the white-tailed deer.
Brackett has an MFA in Electronic Integrated Art from the School of Art and Design at Alfred University and has exhibited work internationally. She is a recipient of the College Art Association Professional Development Fellowship for Visual Artists, funded by the NEA. Her work has been included in the Albright Knox's biennial exhibition Beyond/In Western NY, at the Ball State Museum of Art, and in a solo show titled Deer Dear at SUArt Galleries in Syracuse NY.
She is currently a Professor of Digital Media and Animation at Alfred State College, Alfred NY.
Brackett has an MFA in Electronic Integrated Art from the School of Art and Design at Alfred University and has exhibited work internationally. She is a recipient of the College Art Association Professional Development Fellowship for Visual Artists, funded by the NEA. Her work has been included in the Albright Knox's biennial exhibition Beyond/In Western NY, at the Ball State Museum of Art, and in a solo show titled Deer Dear at SUArt Galleries in Syracuse NY.
She is currently a Professor of Digital Media and Animation at Alfred State College, Alfred NY.
Download the "Buck Up Buttercup" catalog here:
| Downloadable catalog for "Buck Up Buttercup" |
2023 Southern Tier Biennial Jurors:
Andrea Alvarez, PhD is Associate Curator at the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, where she has worked since she joined as a Curatorial Fellow in 2017. Most recently, Alvarez coordinated a site-specific commission by Firelei Báez (2023), an exhibition of Lucas Samaras’s Mirrored Room (2023), and a co-curated off-site exhibition of sculpture by Sarah Braman (2022). Other curatorial projects have included organizing Comunidades Visibles: The Materiality of Migration (2021) and The Swindle: Art Between Seeing and Believing (2018); and co-organizing the Buffalo AKG’s presentation of We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965–85 (2018).
From 2014 to 2017, Alvarez was Director of Exhibitions at Virginia Commonwealth University School of the Arts, where she organized student, faculty, and alumni exhibitions, created interdisciplinary activities and programs, and taught Arts cross-disciplinary courses. She has previously held positions at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond, Virginia, and Fundación Guayasamín, in Quito, Ecuador.
Alvarez earned her PhD from the Department of Art History at Virginia Commonwealth University in 2020, where she previously earned her Master’s degree. She received her bachelor’s degree in Art and Art History from the College of William and Mary.
Alvarez’s curatorial focus is on contemporary art, with a particular interest in the work of Latinx and other artists of global diasporas.
Her thoughts on "Buck Up Buttercup": We selected Buck Up Buttercup as “Best in Show” at the 2023 Southern Tier Biennial because the work deftly navigates questions of gender stereotypes, material histories and engagements, and human relationships with nature. Its restrained composition and palette demonstrate a mature approach, allowing the charged and gendered language
to read prominently by contrast. The subtle contrasts throughout – of the traditionally feminine crafts and masculine culture of hunting, of the metal grommets and the delicate stitches – shed light on the rich potential of cultures like those in rural Western
New York, and it is for that reason we were excited by the idea of seeing a solo exhibition of Tammy’s work in Olean at the Tri-County Arts Council.
From 2014 to 2017, Alvarez was Director of Exhibitions at Virginia Commonwealth University School of the Arts, where she organized student, faculty, and alumni exhibitions, created interdisciplinary activities and programs, and taught Arts cross-disciplinary courses. She has previously held positions at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond, Virginia, and Fundación Guayasamín, in Quito, Ecuador.
Alvarez earned her PhD from the Department of Art History at Virginia Commonwealth University in 2020, where she previously earned her Master’s degree. She received her bachelor’s degree in Art and Art History from the College of William and Mary.
Alvarez’s curatorial focus is on contemporary art, with a particular interest in the work of Latinx and other artists of global diasporas.
Her thoughts on "Buck Up Buttercup": We selected Buck Up Buttercup as “Best in Show” at the 2023 Southern Tier Biennial because the work deftly navigates questions of gender stereotypes, material histories and engagements, and human relationships with nature. Its restrained composition and palette demonstrate a mature approach, allowing the charged and gendered language
to read prominently by contrast. The subtle contrasts throughout – of the traditionally feminine crafts and masculine culture of hunting, of the metal grommets and the delicate stitches – shed light on the rich potential of cultures like those in rural Western
New York, and it is for that reason we were excited by the idea of seeing a solo exhibition of Tammy’s work in Olean at the Tri-County Arts Council.
Judy Barie is a Fine Artist and Curator. She splits her time between Pittsburgh PA and Chautauqua NY, where she has served for the past 16 years as the Director of the Chautauqua Visual Arts Galleries in Chautauqua Institution. Her contemporary abstract paintings have been shown in one person and group shows across the country, and reside in corporate collections, personal homes and museums. After earning a BFA from West Virginia University, she spent a year-long printmaking residency at Atelier 17, now known as Atelier Contrepoint in Paris, France.
Barie applies her aesthetic vision to curate several exhibitions in the CVA Galleries each summer. The mission of the CVA Galleries is a commitment to introduce the audience to artwork that is inclusive, inventive, and created by professional and emerging artists. There is a focus on building strong relationships and conversations with collectors, art enthusiasts, curators and those new to contemporary art, resulting in a universal support of artists both financially and professionally. CVA strives to be an incubator for some of the most talented working artists today, while encouraging others to discover their craft. The galleries are a place to educate and inspire a growing audience on the importance of appreciating and living with art, while exploring an artist's vision and practice.
Her thoughts on "Buck Up Buttercup": There were many excellent works in the 2023 Southern Tier Biennial and we discussed several possibilities for the Best of Show award. All three of us admired Tammy Renee Bracket’s piece for it’s originality and presentation. I was drawn to it immediately for its use of mixed materials and craftsmanship, as well as the message it portrayed. I wanted to see more from this artist, hear about her process and dig deeper into her vision, which is why I voted for her to receive the award.
Barie applies her aesthetic vision to curate several exhibitions in the CVA Galleries each summer. The mission of the CVA Galleries is a commitment to introduce the audience to artwork that is inclusive, inventive, and created by professional and emerging artists. There is a focus on building strong relationships and conversations with collectors, art enthusiasts, curators and those new to contemporary art, resulting in a universal support of artists both financially and professionally. CVA strives to be an incubator for some of the most talented working artists today, while encouraging others to discover their craft. The galleries are a place to educate and inspire a growing audience on the importance of appreciating and living with art, while exploring an artist's vision and practice.
Her thoughts on "Buck Up Buttercup": There were many excellent works in the 2023 Southern Tier Biennial and we discussed several possibilities for the Best of Show award. All three of us admired Tammy Renee Bracket’s piece for it’s originality and presentation. I was drawn to it immediately for its use of mixed materials and craftsmanship, as well as the message it portrayed. I wanted to see more from this artist, hear about her process and dig deeper into her vision, which is why I voted for her to receive the award.
Tullis Johnson, Curator and Manager of Exhibitions and Collections at the Burchfield Penney Art Center, in Buffalo, New York, has organized more than 40 exhibitions of contemporary and historical art. Through his writing on Charles Burchfield, he is an emerging Burchfield Scholar. Respected for placing the work of Burchfield into a contemporary context, Johnson’s scholarship continues to break new ground in the understanding of the artist. His exhibition Blistering Vision: Charles E. Burchfield’s Sublime American Landscapes, examined Burchfield’s role as a link between the American naturalists of the 19th century and the environmental movement emerging in the second half of the 20th century. He co-curated, In the Fullness of Time, Painting in Buffalo, 1832-1972, an exhibition accompanied by a 240-page hardcover illustrated catalogue. He currently manages the curatorial staff at the Burchfield Penney. Johnson received his B.F.A. from the Visual Studies Department at the University at Buffalo earning the Eugene Gaier Award for Excellence in Printmaking.
His thoughts on "Buck Up Buttercup": Tammy Renée Brackett’s work Buck Up Buttercup, 2021-2022 stood out as the most dynamic work at the 2023 Southern Tier Biennial. Olean, where the exhibition was held and Alfred, where the artist works and teaches, both sit close to the border where New York and Pennsylvania meet. In late November as many families are preparing for Thanksgiving, and in the month that follow, over one million people with firearms are out in the woods hoping to bag a dear. The animals that are shot are harvested for their meat, their skin and in some cases their antlers which are kept as trophies to be hung on the walls of hunting camps and homes. With Buck Up Buttercup, Brackett creates another kind of trophy. This time the animal’s skin is transformed into a doily of sorts, challenging traditional uses of the animals’ remains, imploring the view to “buck up” or deal with the somewhat gruesome reality of what happens after the animal is killed.
His thoughts on "Buck Up Buttercup": Tammy Renée Brackett’s work Buck Up Buttercup, 2021-2022 stood out as the most dynamic work at the 2023 Southern Tier Biennial. Olean, where the exhibition was held and Alfred, where the artist works and teaches, both sit close to the border where New York and Pennsylvania meet. In late November as many families are preparing for Thanksgiving, and in the month that follow, over one million people with firearms are out in the woods hoping to bag a dear. The animals that are shot are harvested for their meat, their skin and in some cases their antlers which are kept as trophies to be hung on the walls of hunting camps and homes. With Buck Up Buttercup, Brackett creates another kind of trophy. This time the animal’s skin is transformed into a doily of sorts, challenging traditional uses of the animals’ remains, imploring the view to “buck up” or deal with the somewhat gruesome reality of what happens after the animal is killed.
|
About the Southern Tier Biennial
Founded in 2005 to make a measurable and positive difference for rural artists, the Southern Tier Biennial affords artists an opportunity to take part in the process of a professional art competition and be rewarded for those efforts. Past shows were tremendous successes, with hundreds of artists entering, creating exhibitions that showcased the vitality and diversity of visual art in the region. Each biennial is juried by new jurors and, therefore, the shows they create are different in tone and scope yet equally true to the definition of "a regional survey of visual art.” Accepted works are exhibited in the stunning Tri-County Arts Council Gallery in Olean. This project is produced by the Tri-County Arts Council (Formerly the Cattaraugus County Arts Council), the Cattaraugus Region Community Foundation, and made possible by an endowment from the estate of F. Donald Kenney. |
F. DONALD KENNEY
F. Donald Kenney was a graduate of Olean High School and Holy Cross College. He went on to earn Master of Arts and Master of Business Administration degrees from Harvard University. Kenney, who died in 1997, devoted his life to international investment banking and served as chair of Harriman Ripley International and Merrill Lynch International prior to becoming chair of Goldman Sachs International Corporation from 1976 until his retirement in 1984. Kenney served as chairman of the Board of the National Academy Museum and School of Fine Arts as well as on a number of international arts boards including the International Council of Museums, the Finnish Foundation for the Visual Arts, the Ireland–America Arts Exchange, and the Irish Museum of Modern Art. |
