Faculty Exhibition
February 13–April 3, 2025
How Else Can I Tell You?
By Sophie Brenneman
Sheetz Gallery
Misciagna Family Center for Performing Arts
Penn State Altoona
3000 Ivyside Park
Altoona, PA 16601
814-949-5451
[email protected]
Artist Bio
Brenneman is an assistant teaching professor of visual art studies at Penn State Altoona. She earned her B.F.A. in drawing and painting from the University of Southern Mississippi and her M.F.A. from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia.
Artist Statement
There is an ache in the space between what I see, what I say, what I mean, and what you understand. This body of work stems from that ache—from the urgency to articulate something ungraspable, just beyond language. We live in a time where very little makes logical sense. Through both written and visual language, I attempt the impossible task of explaining myself to (myself and to) you by pinning down fears, contradictions, and emotions with the precision they deserve. But each time I am reminded: language falters, images distort, meaning fractures. How else can I tell you? In these works, I construct visual metaphors that stretch the familiar into the uncanny, layering sensory symbols, paradoxes, and fragments of known or remembered things to try and show you what it feels like to bear witness—to time, to trauma, to power lost and gained, to the paradoxes of protection, to the weight of nostalgia, to the resilience inherent in how we keep going. Each drawing functions like the poem that inspired it—a translation of thought into image, a collision of images meant to evoke rather than dictate. Do you understand me now? Hmm, how else can I tell you?
Checklist
How Else Can I Tell You: It Hurts to be a Different Me Missing a Different You, 2021
Charcoal and graphite on paper
28” x 20”
How Else Can I Tell You: Architecture Can be Soft and Transparent (II), 2025
Charcoal and graphite on paper
28” x 20”
How Else Can I Tell You: I Say ‘Yes’ with a ‘No’-Shaped Mouth, 2022
Charcoal and graphite on paper
28” x 20”
How Else Can I Tell You: I Can Undo You, 2023
Charcoal and graphite on paper
28” x 20”
How Else Can I Tell You: Revolutions Come Over Uninvited Only Sometimes Bringing Cake, 2025
Charcoal and graphite on paper
28” x 20”
How Else Can I Tell You: It’s Always the Wind that No One Sees Coming, 2025
Charcoal and graphite on paper
28” x 20”
How Else Can I Tell You: The Empty Space I Keep Around Me is a Home Built by Hand with the Sounds of Your Name, 2024
Charcoal and graphite on paper
28” x 20”
How Else Can I Tell You: We All End Up Returning to the States in Which We Started, 2024
Charcoal and graphite on paper
28” x 20”
How Else Can I Tell You: Nothing is as it Seems Because it is Being Seen, 2024
Charcoal and graphite on paper
28” x 20”
How Else Can I Tell You: Everything Since the Big Bang is a Smaller Version of the Self, 2024
Charcoal and graphite on paper
28” x 20”