"Bleach"

Heart for a Brain showcases the digital work of local Bellingham artist Brandon Santana. Inspired by the fashion and modelling industries, Santana’s photographs appear editorial. Santana’s aesthetic of primary color gradients, gritty portraits, and bold graphics work together to invoke an otherworldliness that seems perceptible only through the pages of publications that he imitates. He achieves a verisimilitude of this distant, fictive realm of perfectly composed subjects and scenes. Santana’s short films however, capture other worlds entirely each their own. Close-ups, sharp transitions, and dramatic audio contribute to the specific narratives that Santana directs in each of the three videos. Conjuring a fiction, not too far from reality, and exorcising the images from his imagination, Santana manifests them in the artworks featured here. These digital photographs and short films evidence a uniquely human artistic drive; the need to purge oneself of the ceaseless products of their creative faculties.