“wrapped in me,” 2024. Crow wrapped herself in torn photos of herself and shot a fresh portrait.
Writer: Anthony Taylor
“I do have a habit of taking my work down and tearing it all up.” — Brittany Brooke Crow
There’s a phrase that every young writer learns in one creative writing class or another early in their career: Kill your darlings. Originally (and probably apocryphally) attributed to William Faulkner, it’s a piece of advice meant to remind artists not to get too precious about any single idea. It’s a lesson Brittany Brooke Crow has turned into a mantra.
Crow stops short of calling herself a natural born artist. She was always creative and curious as a child, “dabbling,” as she puts it, in a wide range of interests. But it wasn’t until high school that she discovered her love for film photography.
It wasn’t just the creative aspect of actually taking the photograph. It was the connective, visceral quality of darkroom work: physically generating images through the heady alchemy of light, chemicals and time. Her teen years working for the Johnston High School journalism department led her to the University of Northern Iowa’s BFA program, which deepened and enhanced
her appreciation for the human form. It’s that appreciation that has helped establish the 35-year-old as one of Iowa’s most provocatively creative visual artists who uses little more than a camera, her own body and a thrilling willingness to destroy her work.
The process begins simply. Usually once or twice a year, she’ll set up a camera and backdrop in her space at Mainframe Studios, undress and photograph herself. A veteran of modeling for life-drawing classes, she’s used to holding interesting poses for long stretches of time, and she enjoys examining the bends and folds that naturally occur in skin and muscle as a human body moves and stretches.
Sometimes, she has a specific goal in mind, like playing with her shadow as it slowly lengthens and stretches in the setting sunlight. Other times, she’s depicting form and noticing how her body has changed over the years.
From self-portraiture, she began experimenting with collage, cutting full images into strips and arranging them piece by piece into something new. She designed her first collages on her computer but later switched to printed photos that she physically tore, giving the finished product an extra layer of asymmetry.
Olson-Larsen Galleries displayed her first exhibition of collages during the pandemic, in an auxiliary site in Valley Junction that was visible only through a window, by people peering in from the sidewalk. By the time the show concluded, the prints were beyond salvage, faded and warped from weeks in direct sunlight and fluctuating temperatures and humidity. But rather than simply throwing the collages away, Crow tore them up into even further fragments and photographed herself again, lying on the floor among the tattered remnants of her past self.
“Then I started doing that again,” she said. “So now you get photographs of my body next to a tear, but in the torn photograph there’s another tear in my body from another session.”
The process is destructive, cathartic and mercurial. Even now, she’s not completely at ease with it.
“I remember printing out these huge, gorgeous images of my work after one show,” she recalled. “I pinned them to my studio wall and thought, ‘Wow, I have a third to maybe half a show here,’ and then I tore it all up.
“I knew that was what I was planning to do, but I remember looking at the floor and seeing these beautiful images torn up, and I had to leave the studio for the night.”
But even though the act of creating her collages can border on traumatic, the results are powerful and thought-provoking.
“hiding within formalism (002),” 2024.
Some of her work features more traditional imagery. For example, a series of images of her full body, obscured in varying degrees of shadow, recently hung outside her studio at Mainframe. But her finished collages, while still recognizable as a human body, are more disjointed; fragmented, like a half-remembered dream of someone you used to know.
It’s that ambiguity that draws people in at her shows and is something that Crow plays with on a meta level by showing digital collages side-by-side with one she’s torn and pasted by hand. At exhibitions, she enjoys watching viewers lean closer to discern whether a specific tear or image is a digital print or a physical collage. But that invitation for deeper analysis also encourages people to challenge the way they think about nudity.
Even though she creates her art through a feminist lens of control and self-determination, it’s displayed in a world that doesn’t always hold those values dear. Crow admits that the act of displaying images of her bare skin — even ones as jumbled and scattered as her collages — has attracted her share of unwanted advances and uncomfortable remarks.
“There is freedom in being able to approach feminism in the way that I want to, because I think there’s freedom in being able to use my body in this way,” she said. “I don’t really see anything inherently sexual about the nude form. But I would be lying if I said I hadn’t had some interactions with people that have left me very disappointed.”
But that disappointment is not a deterrent. If anything, it reinforces her work’s underlying narrative of a woman exhibiting her own image to a world that’s all too happy to objectify it. And for Crow, one of the lessons she’s taken from the last decade of her work is the ability — the need — to let go. Letting go of her expectations for others, of her expectations for herself. Letting go of her art itself and allowing more space for iteration and growth.
“One of the things that has held me back the most is my attempts at controlling every little detail,” she said. “But there’s beauty in understanding that people can change. Ideas shift, practices shift, priorities shift. And that’s OK.”
Anthony Taylor has written about life in Des Moines for more than 15 years. A dsm profile he wrote about local singer-songwriter Dick Prall won an award in June from the City & Regional Magazine Association.
