MAEP: Ernest Bryant III

Located in Mia’s U.S. Bank Gallery. Ernest Arthur Bryant III is a transdisciplinary artist interested in the historical and contemporary uses of art and artifacts by different cultures around the world. The current direction of his work, an oversized graphic novel titled The Life and Times of the Time Traveler, explores the changing psyche of a character by using narrative and various forms of the arts’ impact on said character. In this project Bryant appropriates the aesthetic and traditional techniques of historicizing etchings and prints with the literary techniques: embedded narrative and frame story, which use many smaller narratives to illustrate grand narratives as in the Bible, the Mahabharata, and 101 Nights.”

Bryant uses these narrative devices and aesthetics to illustrate and explore the changing power dynamic of figures, objects and images within a visual language investigating historical motifs and the function of art and object as meta actors in history. Ernest Bryant has recently returned to his home state after an extended artist residency in Beijing, China, where he researched contemporary Chinese aesthetics, culture and language.

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website.