South Jersey Artist Feature - Bryan Warner
By: Tania Qurashi
For AAPI Heritage Month, SJCA is highlighting artist, Bryan Warner. Warner is an artist and educator based in South Jersey. His work is influenced by Japanese culture, racial identity, fatherhood, and childhood nostalgia. He is a current member of Tiger Strikes Asteroid in Philadelphia.
Tell us about your practice.
Warner: My studio schedule is built around the schedules of my family and my work as an Elementary art teacher. Often my process looks like a thread of short sessions woven together to create a larger artwork. I don’t have time to spend 8 straight hours in the studio, so I find a way to make art for 30-60 minutes whenever possible. This approach has helped me become more patient, efficient, and more conscious of the long view.
My practice currently focuses on painting and drawing from imagery and objects that I collect. I collect things that evoke thoughts of childhood, nostalgia, Americana, Japanese culture, and kitsch. I will make a series until I complete what feels like a body of work. The process is intuitive and involves combining imagery until something catches my attention through humor, beauty, or heartbreak.
Cat, text, and backyard, 24" x 20" oil on canvas. 2020. Image courtesy of the artist.
Can you tell us about the process of your series, Japanese Internment Camp Drawings?
Warner: This series of drawings was based on portrait photographs that Ansel Adams took of detainees at the Manzanar Internment Camp during World War Two. I was browsing the Library of Congress’s collection of portraits to look for source imagery when I found these photos. I began drawing portraits from this collection each day for the month of May during the lockdown in 2020. The drawings started with permanent markers without preliminary pencil sketches because I felt that the mistakes might heighten the emotional intensity of the portraits. The paper was stained with watercolor paint and ink before or after the drawings were completed. As I drew their faces, my mind began wondering about what they were thinking and what happened with their lives. I found the portraits compelling because they were silent artifacts of how the detainees faced their imprisonment in the camps.
Michael Yonemetsu, [i.e., Yonemitsu] x-ray technician, Manzanar Relocation Center 1943 (Adams, Ansel), 12” x 16” ink, watercolor and marker on paper, 2020. Image courtesy of the artist.
How has South Jersey impacted your art practice?
Warner: Living in South Jersey allows me to live close to the culture of Philadelphia, New York, and Washington, DC, but still have access to open space and nature. I greatly appreciate the time I spend visiting the city to see shows and enjoy the solitude that I can find living in South Jersey. I also find inspiration for my art in how the various pockets of culture dovetail here. In some ways, the Seabrook Buddhist Temple could be an analogy for my art practice. It’s a place where displaced Japanese Americans formed a community and created a Buddhist temple. Although the congregants are mostly Japanese, they are practicing a religion inherited from India and doing so in a building modeled after Colonial Revival Architecture. I find that sort of overlapping of cultures to be intriguing.
Mori Nakashima. Manzanar War Relocation Center. 1943 (Ansel Adams), 12” x 16”, Ink, watercolor, and marker on paper, 2020. Image courtesy of the artist.
You can view more of Warners’ art on his website and follow his work on Instagram.
