Tanya Brodsky

Tanya Brodsky (b. Kyiv, Ukraine) is an artist and educator based in Los Angeles. Brodsky holds an MFA from UC San Diego (2016) and a BFA from RISD (2005). She has participated in residencies including The Mountain School of Arts MSA^, SOMA Mexico City, Vermont Studio Center and The Lighthouse Works. Brodsky's work has been reviewed in Artforum, Hyperallergic and Carla, and has been recently exhibited at Left Field Gallery, Tyler Park Presents, The Fulcrum Press, The Box, Ochi Projects, Materials & Applications, Visitor Welcome Center (Los Angeles), Test Site Projects (Las Vegas), The Magic Hour (Twentynine Palms), and the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego. Her public art installation, “Yolki Palki,” was recently on view in West Hollywood. Brodsky teaches sculpture and public art at California State University, Northridge, the University of Southern California, and the California Summer School for the Arts. 

The poetics of futility in the structures that govern everyday life has long been a theme central to my practice. Informed by a childhood in Soviet Ukraine, my work approaches incongruities within the built environment as a tactic for revealing the hidden logics and relationships concealed by familiar use. In my work, elements of architecture and technology are modified, recreated and isolated, generating new, often absurd interrelationships. Doors, gates, fences, railings and window frames appear often as objects that channel motion, posit an inside and outside and mark boundaries between residents, strangers and guests. In 2020, I began a remote collaboration with my father, a retired electrical engineer who spends his retirement jerry-rigging his tract home using pilfered components. Recently, I have been collecting used keychains on eBay, making bronze casts of architectural hardware and taking surreptitious photos at designer showrooms and architectural salvage yards.