Susi Brister Fantastic Habitat

Fantastic Habitat is a body of photographic work depicting anonymous figures covered in densely textured or patterned textiles inserted into various landscapes as mysterious organic forms. Lush faux fur and vivid fabrics conceal the still figures, producing a bizarre visual and contextual relationship between the shrouded form and its environment and creating a landscape-within-landscape effect. Recent images from this series depict figures covered in bold, kitschy textiles situated within unearthly landscapes of the American Southwest, enhancing the strangeness of the figure/environment relationship and introducing further slippage between real and imaginary. Throughout this work Brister questions the nature of sculpture, performance and portraiture, playing with notions of natural vs. artificial, and challenging traditional photographic renderings of the figure in the landscape. At once both humorous and melancholy, these images resonate with a psychological tension, evoking notions of the sublime and the vulnerability of the human body.