Bio:
Brent Wahl was born in Wisconsin and grew up in Columbia, SC. Moving to New York in 1989, he studied photography at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. In 2004, he moved his studio to Philadelphia where he then attended the University of Pennsylvania.
Wahl's photography, installation and time-based work has been exhibited in a variety of venues and institutions in the U.S. and Europe, including solo exhibitions at Vox Populi and Grizzly Grizzly (Philadelphia), and group exhibitions at the Esther Kline Gallery (Philadelphia), Temple Gallery, Tyler School of Art (Philadelphia), The Visual Arts Center of New Jersey, Tate Modern (London), Oblong Gallery (London), #Rank Miami (Miami), X Initiative (NY), Space (Portland, MA), University of North Carolina (Chapel Hill), Dumbo Art Center (Brooklyn), Repetti Gallery (NY), Slought Foundation (Philadelphia), Publico (Cincinnati, OH), Weiss Tech House (Philadelphia), Sackler Center Gallery, BMCA (Boulder, CO), Pratt Manhattan (NY), and New York University (NY). In 2012 his work was featured in Arcadia University's ‘A Closer Look 8' and also commissioned by Grizzly Grizzly and Tiger Strikes Asteroid for their Community Supported Arts program.
In 2014, Wahl was awarded a Pew Fellowship in the Arts. In 2015 he was honored with the G. Holmes Perkins Distinguished Teaching Award from PennDesign and has since led three photography/media intensive trips abroad to Berlin, Havana, and Tokyo. In 2017, his work was featured in the world's preeminent 'ideas festival’, Summit LA (CA). In the summer of 2018, the artist was commissioned and completed a major public artwork for the Philadelphia Rail Park in collaboration with poet Laynie Browne.
Wahl is currently a Senior Lecturer in photography at the University of Pennsylvania.
Statement:
My mother is a biologist; my father was a musician turned theologist, and my stepfather, was a plant morphologist and incidental inventor. Due to my upbringing, it is no surprise that I love transdisciplinary thought and strive to keep this form of inquiry close in my life. Using the camera as a central tool to nurture curiosity – a device of discovery and translation – I am interested in playing with the conventions of photography and how we can still create new ideas through this universal medium. I engage with spatial constructs that use ephemeral materials and play with ambiguity, moving the subject matter through contextual and optical shifts to illicit shifts in meaning. Staging questions about collective identity, our relationship to reality, and how we frame our existence in the universe leads me to combine objects and images, complicating meaning in the frame.
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