AM DeBrincat is a Brooklyn-based multidisciplinary artist whose work explores the hybrid nature of identity in the digital age. DeBrincat’s work has been included in group exhibitions throughout the US and internationally, and in solo exhibitions in the US. Recent residencies and grants include residencies at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA), The Wassaic Project, and Chashama, and grants from the Durst Foundation and the Deming Foundation. Originally from San Francisco, California, DeBrincat received a BA in Spanish and English Literature from the University of Oregon and received an MFA from Parsons the New School for Design.
Statement
AM DeBrincat is a Brooklyn artist whose work explores portraiture and the hybrid nature of identity in the digital age. Collapsing boundaries between genres, DeBrincat’s multi-media approach merges traditions of painting, digital and analog photography, and printmaking in each painting.
DeBrincat’s process starts by appropriating photos from analog and digital archives - historical portrait photography, commercial ad campaigns, and selfies from social media - and arranging small sections of up to 50 photos into a single, deceptively seamless digital composition. DeBrincat then combines colored pencil, acrylic painting, xerox transfer printing, and oil painting to create a hybrid image which transfers the digital image onto canvas and interweaves digital photography with centuries-old painting techniques. From this intricate layering process emerge portraits that complicate the boundaries between the digital and the hand-wrought image, and which question the lines we draw between human and animal, and between the digital world and "real life."
