ARTIST STATEMENT
My work investigates the entangled terrain of inner and outer worlds—the complex, often contradictory relationships humans hold with nature, our bodies, and the environment. It draws from an engagement with sensation, memory, and interior experience, challenging the false certainty that underpins dominant narratives of progress.
Working with concrete and steel—materials central to industrialization—I explore paradox and instability. Concrete embodies dualities: ancient and modern, beautiful and brutal, permanent yet vulnerable. Steel suggests strength but remains in flux, shaped by temperature, humidity, and time.
Through processes of building, editing, and repair, material becomes archive. Imperfections and palimpsests register time and labor, while concrete figures hold space as both bodies and internal states—containers of memory, presence, and change.
BIO
Bryna McCann is a Hudson Valley based artist and is Co-Director and founder of Boiler Room Studios – School of Drawing. She studied Traditional Chinese Medicine, the Alexander Technique and various other modalities of body-work in and after college. During this period she spent her extracurricular time studying drawing and painting under several prominent teachers in New York City. She was introduced to the La Jolla Playhouse prop shop during an extended stay in San Diego. It was during this pivotal period that she learned welding and metal fabrication, returning to her child-hood interests in sculptural form. .
At the same time that she was creating abstract works out of steel, she began studying figurative sculpture: first at the California Sculpture Academy, then at the Florence Academy of Art. Thereafter, she received her MFA from the NY Academy of Art where she refined her creative vision and expanded the mediums she worked in. Her most recent work is born out of the challenge of producing a synthesis between abstract and figurative expressions as archetypes that are capable of transcending our perceived reality through various materials: steel, clay, mesh, plaster, wax, stone and concrete,
