Blane De St. Croix
Photo by Brad Ogbonna
Using research drawn from art, cultural geography, and ecology, Blane De St. Croix takes on the traditional role of artist-explorer in order to explore landscapes that are flashpoints of current social and political conflict.
He uses dialectical contrasts of exterior and interior, monumental and miniature, artifice and reality, subject and object to heighten the polemical nature of his work. For his project Broken Landscape(2009, 2010, 2013) he traveled and researched the Mexican-American border. In Mountain Strip (2010) he recreated a mountaintop that had been destroyed by a strip mining operation. As Joseph D. Ketner II of Emerson College says, “Although his work has affinities with Anselm Kiefer who also investigates the dark histories and myths of inhumanity, unlike, Kiefer, De St. Croix presents the landscape as the object of humanity’s attempts to impose its will on nature. Despite the futility of this desire, as De St. Croix reminds us, mankind persists, and nature simply ignores us.”
Joseph D. Ketner II, “Frozen Dis-Location,” in Blane De St. Croix: Dead Ice (New York: Fredericks & Freiser, 2014), 11.
Brooklyn, NY
Born 1964, Boston, MA
1981 MFA Cranbrook Academy of Art, Bloomfield Hills, MI
1979 BFA Massachusetts College of Art, Boston, MA