Your name
Dillon Bryant
Place of birth
Spearfish, South Dakota, USA
Place where you live now
Arizona, USA
3 words to describe you
I asked 3 people and I received: Eccentric, Resilient, and Unconventional.
Why do you take pictures?
I make pictures to make other pictures. It’s partly rooted in a desire to build connections to and explore a place, a feeling, or someone as well as to play and engage with the world in a way I feel I am unable to do normally.
Where do you get your inspiration?
Everywhere. From my friends, family, and students. Long walks and even longer drives. Things my family never told me about: stories of love, romance, and tragedies in the wilderness. The weather, its turns, and cycles. Snowfall and snowmelt. Blue skies and clouds over “empty” fields of grasses. Ecology and writings on place by American authors. I’ve been writing a script for some image based performances and I've been enjoying reading how writers craft their stage directions and all the gaps between what is written and what viewers see.
Who are your influences?
These are a few of the people who are orbiting my headspace lately in no order: Anne Carson, ABBA, Debby Friday, Samuel Beckett, Wendy Red Star, Lucas Blalock... When I’m working on studio projects, I try to avoid looking at other visual artists to not fall into a cycle of comparing myself to others and having the work suffer.
What determines the subject matter you choose?
I’ve been paying more attention to the impulses I feel in a given moment lately. Occasionally, I am seized with clarity for an idea I am compelled to execute in an obsessive way, looking for images, going through my archive, and setting up tableaux. Sometimes the work is frustratingly slow and only materializes after observation of how fragments communicate with each other. Time and latency are things I’ve been thinking about while in the studio. Sometimes an image I’ve made won’t be used until months or years later because it hasn’t found the right “partner” to speak with or photographs created by my grandparents fifty years ago can’t hold up without the right “ground” to stand on.
What impact would you like your art to have?
The work is rooted in personal inquiry and I recognize that desiring a certain impact can be a tall order for art to have given current circumstances... but, if anything, I’d like the work to be an invitation to look past the immediate surface of what may be familiar and to imagine an alternative.
What artwork do you never get bored with?
I’m incredibly serious about melodrama. Agnetha Fältskog’s version of ABBA’s SOS is one of my absolute favorite pieces of media: the image of a lonely, forlorn lover sending out a distress-signal-pop-ballad to make sense of an ended relationship... delicious. There’s a gif floating around online taken from a scene in the Legend of Zelda Majora’s Mask of a character, who, while the rain pours, is absolutely rocked and heaving tears from heartbreak. The world is ending but she still holds an umbrella against the rain...! It’s all so wretched and earnest. Without overly intellectualizing or going too deep into decades old pop songs and video games, there’s still the faintest glint of a silver lining, that in spite of everything, circumstances could change for the better. Similarly, I appreciate pieces that make me work to make sense of what I’m seeing, hearing, or feeling when engaging with them. I love photographs that are selfish and reluctant to share their contents, making this journey a slow one where trust is built between an author and viewer.
Is there anything you want to add?

The middle of nowhere is still someplace to somebody.

No Place But Here
Project statement

No Place But Here is an ongoing investigation that uses collage and other constructed photographs to play with and against familial and broader narratives of power, control, and connection associated within the American West. Underpinned and intersected by interior questions revolving around ambiguity, artifice, illusion, legibility, and queerness, I focus my inquiry on sites now known as the Colorado Desert in California, and the Black Hills that span South Dakota and Wyoming. These lands possess complex histories of mining and my working process is influenced by a similar visual language colored by concealment, control, and extraction. Beneath the surface of how western lands are looked at and used, the work intersects with my relationship (or lack of one) to relatives and ancestors, using photography a an extended hand back in time to make sense of cycles of inheritance and foreclosed histories. Sifting through archives for materials to reproduce, cut, interlayer, prop up, and redact, I create ephemeral collages and tableaux stage sets fixed through the intervention of a camera. While I am unable to resurrect relationships or histories, the camera allows me to open a generative and critical space in service of an alternative. The resulting collages, montages, and photographs assembled from the strata of images act as vessels for the absurdity and contradictions left in the wake of grief and current day ruins.

dillon bryant
@illo.b