Bio

​Thomas Brasch (B.A, B.Ed. MBA) has devoted twenty-nine years to education. However, his passion for photography drives his creative expression. Completely self- taught, he is able to showcase his perceptions of beauty, turning the real into the surreal. His images have been juried in multiple shows and selected for several private collections in Canada and abroad.
Thomas collects his source material during his travels abroad. He cultivates his source images from the textures and colours that typically surround us. He has drawn inspiration from nature, architecture, interiors, Persian carpets and sculpture.
As a life-long sufferer of anxiety and mood disorder, Thomas creates images that allow him to explore connections between opposite emotional states: chaos and order, fear and contentment, and melancholy and joy. His also has a stress-related chronic ocular condition known as “central serous retinopathy” which alters and distorts his vision to varying degrees. Capitalizing on this, his images speak to how we see and perceive beauty and how we comprehend and interpret these abstract images.

Statement - Out of the Darkness

​Thomas Brasch looks to pay tribute to the circumstances around what follows at the locations of violence on an international scale. He takes photographs of notable architectural landmarks, found at the affected sites, to create a jewel-like abstraction as a testimony to survival from the darkness. He wants to show that despite the abhorrent tragedy and irrecoverable loss of human life, resilience and survival can glow from the chaos of rage and terror. In his artist statement and in blogs, he discusses how the motivations for these acts come from a range of beliefs; political, race or gender-based terrorism, or random acts of violence due to mental instability.
Online, Thomas provides viewers a further experience, with the aim of transforming the image from a reference to a historical event to a memorial present in our hearts and minds. He notes his personal connection to each location in text and, in an audio soundtrack, he reads the long lists of names of those who have perished in the event.