Val Britton received her B.F.A. from Rhode Island School of Design and her M.F.A. from California College of the Arts. Exhibited both nationally and internationally, her work is held in several public collections including the New York Public Library, the New-York Historical Society, the Library of Congress, the Alameda County Art Collection and the National September 11 Memorial & Museum. Recent exhibitions include Secret Project Robot in Brooklyn, Jack Fischer Gallery in San Francisco, the John Michael Kohler Arts Center, San Jose Museum of Art, Katonah Museum of Art, and Johansson Projects. Her work has been featured in New American Paintings, Sleek Magazine (Berlin), Invisible City (Melbourne), Artweek, Elephant, and The Map as Art: Contemporary Artists Explore Cartography by Katharine Harmon. She has been awarded residencies at the Ucross Foundation, the Jentel Artist Residency Program, the Oregon College of Art and Craft, Caldera, the Millay Colony for the Arts, and Recology (formerly San Francisco Recycling & Disposal) and received a Fellowship from Kala Art Institute. She is the recipient of a 2010 grant from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation.
Her immersive, collaged works on paper draw on the language of maps. She was inspired to begin this body of work by her longing to connect to her father, a long haul cross country truck driver and mechanic who passed away when she was a teenager. Based on road maps of the United States, routes her father often traveled, and an invented conglomeration, mutation, and fragmentation of those passageways, her works on paper help her piece together the past and make up the parts she cannot know.
These mixed media abstractions map not only physical locations but also psychological and emotional spaces. Connecting paper fragments together through collage, drawing, painting, staining with salty washes of ink, printing, stitching and cutting paper have become methods for navigating the blurry terrain of memory and imagination. Using hand-cut paper shapes as collage material and cutting into the ground paper of a work brings the drawings into a sculptural space that hovers between two- and three-dimensions.
An ongoing concern in her studio practice is how to push the language of abstraction in order to create a visceral sense of movement through space and an emotional impact. Britton is interested in how her work can explore the tension between chaos and imposed order, the concrete and the imaginary, the known and unknown.
Traveling, navigating routes, mapping our experiences, making choices at a crossroads, viewing purpose as a destination: these common metaphors link experiencing life with the notion of a journey. In Britton’s work, the retelling of our stories, the reconstruction of our journeys, helps us make sense of the now, and the retelling is its own journey. Mapping serves as a metaphor for searching, an implication of the unknown in wide, open spaces, and a trace of how we see where we've been.
