Brooks Dierdorff

Brooks Dierdorff's website

http://www.brooksdierdorff.com/

Through a wide range of media including photography, video, performance, and sculpture, I interpret physical and psychological encounters between man and the natural world. Specifically, I am interested in the complex relationship that hunting culture has established with nature. Hunting can be the epitome of humankind’s oppositional relationship with nature, but it can also represent a communion with nature. In my work I seek points of friction, where culturally constructed definitions of nature and culture, animal and human, begin to break down. My recent work attempts to deconstruct and understand the codes that prevail within representations employed by hunters and hunting culture, exposing a multiplicity of meanings and intentions that lie beneath the surface. Where exactly is the border that defines or distinguishes the human from the animal, nature from culture, society from wildness? There are many products in hunting culture such as scent-masking sprays, animal calls, and camouflage clothing that assist the hunter in assuming the role of the animal that is being hunted. Might the desire to hunt also represent a suppressed desire to be subsumed by nature and wildness?

Brooks Dierdorff, Blind, 2012

Brooks Dierdorff, Cougar, 2012

Brooks Dierdorff, Coyote, 2012

Brooks Dierdorff, Remnant, 2012

Brooks Dierdorff, Twitch, 2012