Brandi Merolla grew up in NYC and has taken photographs for more than 40 years around the world. Her portraits capture candid moments in time of simple yet thoughtful gestures or gazes that connect with humanity. Merolla literally cuts and pastes the figures into a landscape or cityscape, old school, with a blade, brush and glue. Then her large paper prints are affixed in layers onto wood panels. The assemblages are evocative and edgy playing with scale in a wondrous way. Themes of individualism as well as an intimate look at cultural isolation connect the series. These surreal compositions combine locations and subjects that would never exist outside of her imagination.

Brandi has a BFA in drawing and photography from Mason Gross School of the Arts in New Brunswick, NJ. Her work has been shown internationally from ArtPrize in Michigan to the Ryerson Museum in Toronto as well as in numerous publications and galleries since 1989.

This work comes from her time as art director at Tower Records/4th & Broadway in NYC beginning in 1983 where she made custom 3D displays and continued to do so for 35 years throughout the NYC tri-state area. Merolla created handmade displays for all the major record labels to hang in record stores, as well as in F.A.O. Schwarz, and on the set of the Howard Stern Show for decades. This fusion of her large-scale commercial display work with her fine art photography has yielded something bold, odd and uniquely intriguing.