Dopamine, 2020
Single-channel video
(4:20)
Dopamine was made shortly after the pandemic began from videos of moments that give a small hit of joy, an immediate sense of pleasure. Some are beautiful; others are funny, strange, or simply satisfying. These fragments preserve the feelings of noticing something wonderful before it disappears. Making the work helped me remember that even during a frightening and uncertain time, little things could still feel magical.
Numbers 23:23 (What hath God wrought!), 2018
Solar Studios at Rice University, Houston Tx
Created for The Ends of Our Index Fingers Are Mute at the Solar Studios, Numbers 23:23 (What hath God wrought!) turned the exhibition space into the sculpture. Each artist in the exhibition was given a container as a place to present work, instead of filling the space, Brown sealed it shut with a chain and padlock, closing off the interior and leaving visitors on the outside.
Inside, a smoke machine controlled by a programmable timer switches on and off in the rhythm of Morse code. The pattern spells out “What hath God wrought,” the message Samuel F. B. Morse sent in 1844 to open the American telegraph era. The phrase comes from the Book of Numbers, chapter 23, verse 23. As smoke fills the container, it seeps through the seams and gaps and rises into the air, so the sealed box appears to be sending a signal in the middle of the Rice University campus.
The piece drew the attention of many passersby who didn’t know it was an artwork. Over the course of the exhibition, police and the fire department were called to the site several times.
The work reflects on the unintended consequences of our efforts to solve problems. Powered by the sun and staged within a solar-energy research space, the container points to our search for clean, renewable energy, and to the way each fix tends to create a new problem. When we put out one fire, we often start another. Morse’s message, first sent as a marvel of human progress, becomes a question about what our inventions set in motion.
.– …. .- – / …. .- – …. / –. — -.. / .– .-. — ..- –. …. –
Partially Buried Cereal Aisle, 2013
Gondola shelving, cereal boxes, concrete, and hardware
48″ × 60″ × 24″
A single unit of grocery store shelving, tipped back and partially sunk into the ground, holds roughly forty boxes of cereal. Each box has been emptied and refilled with concrete. The cereal aisle, among the most ordinary sites of everyday choice, becomes a monument to the sheer volume of decisions contemporary life demands.
Faced with dozens of nearly identical products, even a trivial decision can become weighty, and the fear of choosing wrong can leave us unable to choose at all. Here, that paralysis takes physical form: the boxes can no longer be lifted, compared, or taken home. They have stopped moving, and in stopping, they have begun to settle into the earth like fossils.
The work references Robert Smithson’s Partially Buried Woodshed (1970), for which Smithson piled earth onto a shed until its central beam cracked, then left the structure to decay. Partially Buried Cereal Aisle is likewise half-claimed by the ground and meant to change over time. Exposed to sun, rain, and wind, the printed cardboard fades, softens, and falls away. Eventually, only a spare geometric structure of metal and concrete remains: a relic of the present, and the skeleton of an aisle built around choice.
Several Ways to Start a Fire, 2013
Twigs, rope, steel wool, battery, magnifying glass, aluminum can, chocolate, underwear, close pins, condom, water, and hardware
Wonderwall (karaoke booth), 2014
Shower curtains, shower fixture and caddy, iPad, microphone, headphones, speaker
Wonderwall was a site-specific installation that consisted of a karaoke booth that mimicked a shower stall. Individuals were instructed to sing along to the music they heard threw headphones as the lyrics appeared on a monitor in front of them. The a-cappella vocals were audible throughout the gallery space during the exhibition. Each performance was recorded and layered into a single track, creating the illusion of a choir.
Escape Plan, 2012
Drafting compass, drywall, motor, hardware
Act I: Waiting Room (detail), 2017
Charcoal drawing, beta fish, candy bowl, succulent, sign-in book, bell and pen.
dimensions variable
Act III: Columns (1-3), 2015-2016
Artificial turf, black beauty abrasive, plaster, cement, wax, chocolate, bacon fat, Vaseline, clay, resin, foam, glass, ink, debris, found objects, speakers, and record player
Dimensions variable
Transpacific (a line drawn from Texas to Japan), 2012
194 #2 pencils, paper, steel, pencil sharpeners
40″w x 72″h
Purification Station, 2013
Plastic, Trinity River water, pecan & rose artesian charcoal, white marble chips, beach sand from Exotic Locations™, pump, and glass beverage dispenser
50″w x 61″h x 35″d
15,540 Miles, 2002
School desk, #2 Pencils, sawdust, chalkboard, cyanotype on carpet
Variable dimensions
Low Hanging Fruit, 2018
Cyanotype on canvas with product labels
variable sizes
Coupling, 2020
Spider Webs, 2017
Cyanotype on canvas
16.5″w x 20”h
Title Loan, 2017
Cyanotype on canvas
variable sizes
Failure to Launch (excerpt), 2016
Single-channel video
(01:41:18)
Failure to Launch (excerpt) from Bradly Brown on Vimeo.
Side A‘s, 2016
Silicone mold, and unique resin cast LP. Each color of silicone signifies a different vinyl record used to create the mold.
14” x 14”
Matchbooks, 2010
Digital prints from film scans
Varible Dimensions
Road Agent, Dallas, TX • 09.07
Beastly Words explores the fundamental flaw of language as an expression of our deepest selves, and the contradictions of language as image. Pained, repetitive words and phrases are subdued and channeled into new forms, given life as watery zebras, muscular tigers, an anthropomorphized WWII fighter plane, and breathless track runners.
Brown first creates film negatives from mysterious scrawlings recovered from a university library trash can—the aching and robotic exercises of an unknown author. Brown’s subsequent use of older photographic techniques to recontextualize the images, through Cyanotype and Van Dyke processes, naturally limits his palette to a calming range of organic browns and blues, fading or deepening depending on exposure to light. He imposes a more natural and visceral world on the underlying fumbling language, as well as foiling the hyper-Photoshopped slickness of our mass-media world.
Road Agent, Dallas, TX • 04.06
“Boys will be boys”— or so the saying goes. In Bradly Brown’s first exhibit at Road Agent, he offers theatrical photographs that toy with questions of how young men construct their identities as they gradually mature into adulthood. In several of Brown’s photographs the artist and his friends playact with plastic animal masks hiding their faces. An Arcadian narrative unfolds, juxtsposing homoerotic yearnings with a suggestive menance. The most striking photo of the show, however, extends beyond a beautifully rendered, but simply conceived drama. Dominated by rich orange hues, a fractured and deteriorating wall opens into a small room that houses a solitary schoolboy, hands tied to a chair. This luxuriously colored photograph and the threatening mystery it encapsulates is as viscerally enticing as it is emotionally unsettling.
—Flash Art Magazine, Matthew Bourbon
Three Trees, 2012
Unique digital prints
13″ x 17″
Drawing Stairs (1-9), ongoing
Graphite / ink on paper
Donkey Punch
2008
Mixed media on chalk board
48″ x 72″
Love’s Last Shift
mixed media on canvas
38″ x 36″
2005
Take Less Than You Need, 2002
Mixed media on canvas
43″ x 56″
The Texas-based art collective HOMECOMING! Committee was founded to create initiatives and spaces where artists, designers, and creative thinkers could collaborate as equals, engaging in a shared practice of artistic agency. Through interactive and participatory events, HOMECOMING! fostered an environment that empowered artists to take action, build networks, and pursue future collaborations.This fortification of creative resources repositioned the artist as an individual that shapes cultural discourse, rather than a member of society that merely reacts to it.
For More Information about HOMECOMING! Committee, please visit www.themodern.org/podcast/
SELECTED HOMECOMING! EVENTS:
Launch Party, 2011
Hands on an Art Body, 2012
Post Communiqué , 2013
Friskt kopplat, hälften brunnet. (Quickly connected, half burned.), 2013
The Eagle has Landed, 2013
MacGuffin, 2013-2014
1. Your hair should be trim, clean and combed.
2. Nails should be clean and trimmed.
3. Be conservative and err on the side of caution. If the company does not have a dress code, remember that its better to overdress than underdress.
4. Arrive at least 10 minutes before your interview. The extra minutes will also give time to fill out any forms or applications that might be required.
5. Turn off your cell phone or pager.
6. Don’t assume that whoever greets you is the receptionist.
1. Make a positive and professional first impression by being assertive and giving a firm handshake to each interviewer and addressing each interviewer by name.
2. Reinforce your professionalism and your ability to communicate effectively by speaking clearly and avoiding “uhs”, “you knows”, and slang.
3. Use appropriate wording. You won’t receive extra points for each word that has more than 10 letters. Use technical terms only when appropriate to the question.
1. Shake each interviewer’s hand and thank each interviewer by name.
2. Send a thank you note as soon after the interview as soon as possible.
On Leapig from Airplanes, 2006
Splashlight Studio, New York, NY • 01.06
