Category: EXHIBITIONS

UUUUUU, 2023

Posted on October 17, 2026October 21, 2026

UUUUUU (The Last Laugh), 2023
Copper wire from internet cable
Dimensions variable

Exhibited in SPHERE Salón Internacional de Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico City, Mexico, 2023, and 150 Years 150 Artists, Fort Worth Contemporary Arts, Fort Worth, TX, 2023.

UUUUUU explores the increasingly dependent, interconnected relationship between the organic and the technological. Using copper wire stripped from internet cable, Brown hand-forms a spiderweb, a structure that is both a natural network and a stand-in for the digital one the material was built to carry.

The series title is a play on “WWW,” the World Wide Web. Works subtitled The Last Laugh hold a clown accessory caught in the web: a red clown nose, or a gag flower that squirts water.

The work is part of an ongoing practice that plays with materials and their symbolic associations to consider technology’s role in nature, daily life, and social connection, and how much of contemporary life now depends on the bond between the two.

UUUUUU (The Last Laugh), 2023 — artwork by artist Bradly Brown. Catalog page showing a copper-wire spiderweb holding a red clown nose on a white wall, beside the artist statement in Spanish

UUUUUU (The Last Laugh), 2023 — artwork by artist Bradly Brown. Two installation views of copper-wire spiderwebs holding red clown noses on white gallery walls

Partially Buried Cereal Aisle, 2013

Posted on May 23, 2014October 21, 2026

Partially Buried Cereal Aisle, 2013
Gondola shelving, cereal boxes, concrete, and hardware
48″ × 60″ × 24″

Exhibited in Subject to Change/PRKD, FIG Sculpture Park, Dallas, TX, 2013

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.

"Partially Buried Cereal Aisle"

Partially Buried Cereal Aisle, 2013 — artwork by artist Bradly Brown. Diagonal view of gondola shelving stocked with cereal boxes, tilted and half-sunk into a grass lawn

Partially Buried Cereal Aisle, 2013 — artwork by artist Bradly Brown. Gondola shelving stocked with cereal boxes, half-sunk into a grass lawn in front of a dark stone wall

Columns, 2015–2016

Posted on November 15, 2016October 28, 2026

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

Act III: Columns (1–3) was made during Brown’s time in the Lawndale Artist Studio Program. It is the final act of a larger narrative that also includes Act I: Waiting Room and the records of Side A. Together, the works form the set for an unfinished three-part play that is still missing its second act.

The work consists of three broken columns, the ruins of a structure that once stood. To make them, Brown built three adjustable housings and, over the course of the residency, filled them with studio waste, found objects, ephemera, trash, and other things he had collected. Between layers of objects he poured phase-changing materials, substances that turn from liquid to solid: two-part plastics, silicone rubber, resin, wax, concrete, plaster, and even chocolate and bacon fat. Rebar ran through each mold, both for reinforcement and to exaggerate the broken condition of the finished pieces. Each column became a kind of time capsule.

When the walls of the molds came off, many of the hidden objects revealed themselves through cracks and broken sections, and Brown excavated parts of the columns to expose even more. He then applied a patchwork of tiles over sections of each column, suggesting how they looked originally, before they began to decay and fall apart.

Conceptually, the work is about the giant structures we trust every day without question: physical ones like buildings and bridges, but also institutions like banks, governments, and commercial giants. We only ever see them from the outside, and what lies beneath that thin shell may be very different. The piece was inspired by a 2016 news story from Taiwan, where an earthquake brought down an apartment building and revealed tin cans packed inside its pillars.

The three columns sit on an island of artificial turf surrounded by black sand. Their soundtrack comes from the records of Side A, another picture of a fragmented culture: bits and pieces joined together in an attempt to make the semblance of a whole. The result scratches, skips, and gets stuck repeating its blemishes until someone moves the needle.

Columns, 2015–2016 — artwork by artist Bradly Brown

Damemoto (Nothing to Lose), 2012

Posted on May 20, 2014October 21, 2026

Damemoto (Nothing to Lose), 2012
Reclaimed wood, weeds, lights, water bowl, hardware

Exhibited in Sons and Daughters of the Sun and Star II, Hiroshima City University, Hiroshima, Japan, 2012

The March 11, 2011, Great East Japan earthquake and tsunami sent millions of tons of debris drifting across the Pacific Ocean, and much of it washed up on the West Coast of the United States and Canada. In June 2012, a 66-foot concrete and metal dock from Misawa, Japan, came ashore at Agate Beach, Oregon.

Brown made Damemoto in Hiroshima that year, as part of Sons and Daughters of the Sun and Star, an exchange program between Texas Christian University and Hiroshima City University. The long, low pier was assembled from debris from the 2011 earthquake, with clumps of weeds growing up through its planks and strands of blinking string lights running its length. It was meant as a literal bridge and dock between the two countries, a path for help to travel during a huge tragedy. Writing in the exhibition catalog, Kenji Kajiya described the lights as honoring the dock’s “mighty voyage across the sea.”

The bilingual exhibition catalog, with essays by Lucia Simek and Kenji Kajiya, is available as a PDF: Sons and Daughters of the Sun and Star catalog (PDF, 3.4 MB). See also Transpacific, made for the Fort Worth half of the exchange.

Damemoto (Nothing to Lose), 2012 — artwork by artist Bradly Brown. End of a wooden pier with a ladder, edged in blinking blue string lights

Damemoto (Nothing to Lose), 2012 — artwork by artist Bradly Brown. Long view of the wooden pier running through a dark corrugated-metal room, lit with string lights

Transpacific, 2012

Posted on May 20, 2014October 21, 2026

Transpacific (a line drawn from Texas to Japan), 2012
194 #2 pencils, paper, steel, pencil sharpeners
40″w x 72″h

Exhibited in Sons and Daughters of the Sun and Star I, Fort Worth Contemporary Arts, Fort Worth, TX, 2012
Catalog: Sons and Daughters of the Sun and Star (PDF). See also Damemoto, made for the Hiroshima half of the exchange.

Made for an exchange between Texas Christian University and Hiroshima City University, Transpacific is one continuous line drawn with 194 pencils on a single sheet of paper. By the old claim that a pencil can draw a line 35 miles long, together they hold about 6,790 miles of graphite, the distance from Fort Worth to Hiroshima.

The word Chorioactis is masked out and left blank. It is the Latin name of a rare mushroom, the Devil’s Cigar or Texas Star in the United States and kirinomitake in Japan, that grows only in a few isolated places in Texas and Japan. The drawing’s repeated marks echo its spores drifting between the two, carried by wind and chance. The piece is shown with everything left from the 194 pencils: broken tips, shavings, and stubs sharpened down as far as they would go. In her essay for the exhibition catalog, critic Lucia Simek pointed to Transpacific as a record of the exchange itself, the artists’ actual journey between the two cities rendered in graphite.

Transpacific, 2012 — artwork by artist Bradly Brown

Title Loan, 2017

Posted on November 24, 2021October 23, 2026

Title Loan, 2017
Cyanotype on canvas
variable sizes

Title Loan was made during the North Set Residency, a March–May 2017 residency organized by Bea Ying Projects in Houston. Three artists, Bradly Brown, Jessica Ninci, and Eden Rae, were given a vacant commercial building at 3411 Irvington Boulevard to use as studio space for several months. The building, renamed North Set Studios, had once been a title loan office. Work made during the residency was shown at the North Set Residency Closing Exhibition on April 28, 2017.

The series is a group of cyanotypes on canvas that reflect on the space they were made in. A title loan office sells the promise of a quick way forward, and the work considers the pursuit of the American Dream: how chasing it can feel like Sisyphus pushing a boulder up the hill, and how that pursuit is taken advantage of by people and businesses like short-term lenders.

A large cyanotype of palm trees stands in for the idealized “paradise” at the end of that pursuit. Other prints are made from sheets of paper Brown pulled out of a trash can, left by someone, perhaps a student, who was learning English and had written the same words over and over as practice. The dense pages of repeated handwriting show the work and commitment it takes to chase a better life, even when that effort becomes obsessive and compulsive. Two giant cyanotype pennies on canvas offer Brown’s two cents on the pursuit of happiness and on those who profit from it.

A second series made at North Set, Spider Webs, extends the idea: the webs reference how title loan and other short-term lending companies can trap people in cycles of debt that are hard to escape. The found English-practice pages also appear in Brown’s earlier exhibitions Barnyard and Beastly Words.

The North Set Residency Zines, printed by The Center for Imaginative Cartography and Research, are available for purchase here.

Cyanotype on canvas of palm tree silhouettes against a pale sky, from Title Loan (2017) by Bradly Brown

Cyanotype on canvas of a handwritten page of repeated English practice words, from Title Loan (2017) by Bradly Brown

Beastly Words, 2007

Posted on October 17, 2011October 21, 2026

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.

Beastly Words, 2007 — artwork by artist Bradly Brown

Barnyard, 2006

Posted on May 22, 2009October 21, 2026

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