Since his childhood, Brandan Gomez has been perplexed with religious narratives and mythology, and his inability to find proof – spiritual or scientific—of their real-life foundations. His recent series Mystica X is a visual quest to make sense of this uncertainty and his ongoing challenge in contemplating what he sees as their lack of conviction.
The resulting pictures are a combination of photographs he shoots himself and appropriates from sources like NASA and telescope images he finds online. His own images range from beach scenes and natural landscapes to gas stations and firefighters, each manipulated and layered with his found imagery to visualize their dreamlike absurdity. Rather than offer any answers to his ongoing questions, Gomez develops his own sense of folklore in a black and white haze of psychedelic hues.
In contrast to many 1970’s color photographers who used color to provide pure photographic description, Gomez shoots and appropriates entirely in black and white to emphasize the strange and unreal-ness of religious mythology. His monochromatic palate highlights what he sees as an unfathomable fantasy world. “In an apparent chaos,” writes Gomez, “ these images describe an unreal landscape where, as a healing process, I photograph objects and situations in disorder. I manipulate and combine them to create an iconographic space where beliefs of any kind can be real.”
Bio: Brandan Gomez, b. 1980 is a photographer and creative director based in A Coruña, Spain. His work has been exhibited in various group exhibitions, and has been published in various online venues including Monovisions, Burn Magazine, Der Greif, aCurator and Lensculture.