ABOUT Brittany Kiertzner

Brittany Kiertzner (ARISAWE) is a multidisciplinary fine artist and an enrolled member of the St Regis Mohawk Tribe, Iroquois Nation. She holds a BFA from California State University, Fullerton. She has completed artist residencies at institutions such as Craft in America Center and Wonzimer WARP Los Angeles. Her work has been the subject of solo exhibitions and numerous group exhibitions nationally and internationally since 2007 at locations such as the Benton Museum of Art, CAMP gallery and Wonzimer Gallery.  She has appeared in publications such as Artillery Magazine, Young Space, and 13 Things by Shana Nys Dambrot.  Her work is in the permanent collection of the Sasse Museum of Art and in private collections nationally. She manages her studio in Los Angeles, California at Wonzimer.​

 

Practice:
Kiertzner’s artistic practice engages with the conceptual terrain of repetition and cultural memory in ways that parallel the theoretical concerns of De Gruyter’s Media and Cultural Memory Studies. Her iterative use of materials and forms functions not merely as aesthetic choice but as a methodological strategy for evoking collective memory—particularly the cumulative memory of ecological collapse, land-use violence, and the disenfranchisement of Indigenous communities. In this framework, repetition operates as both mnemonic and metaphoric: it inscribes cycles of trauma and resistance, thereby foregrounding the persistence of histories often rendered invisible. Through the near-figurative abstraction of her works, Kiertzner invites viewers into a temporal layering where past injustices reverberate into present crises, ultimately disrupting the linearity of historical narrative and emphasizing memory as a dynamic, mediated process.

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Moreover, Kiertzner’s engagement with themes of extraction, alienation, and cultural dislocation can be fruitfully examined through Jean-Paul Sartre’s existentialist concept of “the Other.” Sartre posits “the Other” as a constitutive force in the formation of selfhood, often emerging through processes of objectification and estrangement. In Kiertzner’s work, the Indigenous subject and the ecologically violated landscape are positioned within this dialectic of otherness—not merely as victims of systemic violence, but as sites of philosophical and cultural interrogation. Her materials, often sourced from or resembling degraded natural environments, become signifiers of both loss and endurance. This interplay mirrors Sartre’s assertion that to be seen as “Other” is to be reduced and displaced, yet also to occupy a space of radical visibility and potential agency. Through this lens, Kiertzner’s art not only engages in cultural memory-making but also in the ontological reassertion of marginalized identities and ecologies, challenging viewers to reconsider their relationship to histories of displacement and the futures those histories still shape.

 

Themes:
The themes in Kiertzner’s work transcend the material realm to enter a metaphysical and philosophical register, where form becomes a vehicle for meditative inquiry and a spiritual reflection of describing Peace as an objective. Her sculptures and paintings frequently explore cosmic order and the interdependence of existence, grounded in Indigenous epistemologies that resist compartmentalized Western distinctions between the physical and the spiritual. Central to this inquiry is the recurring motif of the Onkwehonwehne’ha—the wampum circle—a sacred symbol within the Iroquois tradition. Kiertzner’s invocation of this form, enriched with tangent lines forming concentric geometries, constitutes a visual philosophy of relationality and collective memory. The wampum circle, or Teiotiokwaonhaston, stands not simply as an object of democratic exchange, but as a metaphysical statement: a model of unity held together by mutual obligation and spiritual coherence. Kiertzner’s abstract interpretation of this form—where each tangent holds the next in a perpetual embrace—transforms the political into the idealist, offering a critique of disconnection through a reaffirmation of ontological belonging.

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In this framework, her layered, colored circles evolve beyond their formal properties to become symbolic constellations—traces of celestial trajectories that link the microcosm of human experience to the macrocosm of the universe. Each circle functions as an autonomous yet relational entity, echoing the Iroquois understanding of harmony through differentiation. The geometric rigor in her compositions does not negate emotional resonance; rather, it amplifies it, guiding the viewer through a contemplative space where logic and feeling converge. The subtle chromatic transitions suggest not just movement but transformation, embodying cycles of life, death, and rebirth. In this way, Kiertzner’s work becomes an invocation of cosmological empathy—a visual language that articulates the deep interconnectivity between land, spirit, memory, and future. Her art invites a reconsideration of being, urging a return to a more integrative, spiritually attuned understanding of existence.

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Paintings/Drawings:

Kiertzner’s (Arisawe) pastel works, created from 2013 to the present, reflect a process-oriented engagement with materials and a lineage rooted in transcendental and surrealist traditions. Utilizing oil sticks by Jack Richeson and layering soft pastels from Rembrandt, Kiertzner employs a tactile, layered technique in which the materiality of pigment becomes central to both form and meaning. Her process often begins with the gestural application of oil stick, establishing a foundational ground upon which she repetitively marks with pastel. These marks are not merely additive; they are forcefully embedded, as she crushes pigment into the surface with an insistence that emphasizes the physicality of drawing. The material build-up creates a vibratory tension between opacity and luminosity, reflecting both the intensity of emotional expression and the contemplative stillness of spiritual inquiry.

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Influenced by the Surrealist technique of automatic drawing, Kiertzner allows the movement of her hand to guide the composition, bypassing conscious representation in favor of intuitive gesture. This approach aligns her with historical figures of the Transcendental Painting Group (TPG), such as Lee Mullican, Gordon Onslow Ford, and Agnes Pelton, whose works sought to access metaphysical realms through abstraction. Within this lineage, Kiertzner’s work resonates with a contemporary transcendental movement emerging in Los Angeles, alongside artists like Loie Hollowell and Mimi Lauter. Her  sculptural work also includes compositions that incorporate abstract symbols— lingams, and biomorphic forms—that echo sacred geometries and the organic structures of nature. Central among these motifs is her reimagining of the wampum circle, which she renders not as static iconography but as a generative form that unfolds through layered gesture and color. In this way, her pastel works serve as both meditative surfaces and sites of cultural and cosmological inquiry.

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Sculpture:
Kiertzner’s sculptural practice constitutes a rigorous engagement with material processes and embodied labor, recalling the formal and tactile sensibilities of Lydia Benglis’s postminimalist compositions. Her works, often elongated and contorted, are constructed through a physically demanding process of piercing, pulling, and warping fiber over armatures composed of wire mesh, upholstery fabric, plaster, and linear woven elements. This process foregrounds the artist’s bodily interaction with the medium, infusing the sculptures with a dynamic interplay between force and delicacy. The resultant forms—monolithic and totemic in their presence—invoke a visceral response, situating themselves between the organic and the abstract. Kiertzner’s integration of traditional weaving techniques into three-dimensional forms operates as a kind of spatial embroidery, transforming practices often gendered and marginalized in art historical discourse into a mode of critical, sculptural expression.

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Kiertzner’s forms are deeply informed by the sacred Indigenous stonework of the Northeastern United States, yet they eschew direct mimesis in favor of visual metaphor. Her aim is not to reconstruct these sacred sites, but to reinterpret their formal and spiritual resonances within a contemporary idiom. In doing so, she articulates a counter-narrative to dominant historical representations that have framed Indigenous histories in the Northeast as conclusively past or vanished. Rather than monumentalizing loss, her sculptures assert continuity and adaptation, embodying the endurance of Indigenous epistemologies and sovereignties. The tactile surfaces and gestural configurations of her forms function as repositories of cultural memory (i.e. Mohawk basketry and embroidery traditions), testifying to the persistence of Indigenous presence in the face of systemic erasure. Through this sculptural vocabulary, Kiertzner reclaims both physical and symbolic space, insisting on a recognition of histories and identities that remain vital, resilient, and ongoing.

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