Tag: installation art

Dearman, 2026

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Dearman, 2026
Mixed media: found objects, foam, plaster, and paint
Approx. 75″ × 50″ × 30″, dimensions variable

Exhibited in YARD, an exhibition series in Houston front yards organized by Chris Wicker, Anna Taylor, and Trent Teinert with support from The Idea Fund

Dearman is a cervitaur, a half-man, half-deer figure built from found objects, foam, plaster, and paint. Its name and structure come from DEAR MAN, a skill from Dialectical Behavior Therapy for asking clearly for what you need.

Presented in a front yard, Dearman stood with ten bags of ice tied to his wrists, five in each hand, weighing his arms down. Throughout the exhibition, visitors were invited to fill a helium balloon and tie it to his wrist. Over three to four hours, the Houston heat melted the ice, the balloons accumulated, and, with a final push from a gust of wind, both of his arms rose straight into the air.

The work depended on weather, time, and the people who wandered through the yard to complete it. In a gallery it would have been a sculpture with a set of instructions; in the open it became a slow public event. The final pose can be read as surrender, hands up, or as ascension, asking to be lifted.

Dearman, 2026 — artwork by artist Bradly Brown
Dearman, 2026 — artwork by artist Bradly Brown
Dearman, 2026 — artwork by artist Bradly Brown
Dearman, 2026 — artwork by artist Bradly Brown
Dearman, 2026 — artwork by artist Bradly Brown
Dearman, 2026 — artwork by artist Bradly Brown
Dearman, 2026 — artwork by artist Bradly Brown
Dearman, 2026 — artwork by artist Bradly Brown
Dearman, 2026 — artwork by artist Bradly Brown
Dearman, 2026 — artwork by artist Bradly Brown
Dearman, 2026 — artwork by artist Bradly Brown
Dearman, 2026 — artwork by artist Bradly Brown
Dearman, 2026 — artwork by artist Bradly Brown
Dearman, 2026 — artwork by artist Bradly Brown
Dearman, 2026 — artwork by artist Bradly Brown

Layer Cake, 2024

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Layer Cake (San Miguel, Valmontone, & Cereal Aisle), 2024
Inkjet prints
24″ × 95″ each

Exhibited in Layer Cake, a group exhibition with Jonathan Paul Jackson and Xochi Solis at the University Gallery, Sam Houston State University, Huntsville, Texas.

Each panorama in Layer Cake was shot on an iPhone from a moving vehicle: a train, a car, or a shopping cart. Panorama mode expects a slow, steady sweep, so the motion breaks each scene into stretched, repeated, and misaligned slices full of digital glitches and distortion.

In the gallery, the prints hang alongside spools of tiny square stickers in red, green, blue, black, and white. Each sticker is a pixel. Visitors are invited to patch and repair the glitches, but every repair adds to the abstraction, turning the camera’s errors into a shared composition.

Each person becomes a pixel, and the image reaches its best resolution only when everyone takes part.

Layer Cake, 2024 — artwork by artist Bradly Brown
Layer Cake, 2024 — artwork by artist Bradly Brown
Layer Cake, 2024 — artwork by artist Bradly Brown
Layer Cake, 2024 — artwork by artist Bradly Brown
Layer Cake, 2024 — artwork by artist Bradly Brown
Layer Cake, 2024 — artwork by artist Bradly Brown
Layer Cake, 2024 — artwork by artist Bradly Brown
Layer Cake, 2024 — artwork by artist Bradly Brown

UUUUUU, 2023

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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
UUUUUU (The Last Laugh), 2023 — artwork by artist Bradly Brown. Copper-wire spiderweb holding a red clown nose, strung below a ceiling pipe in a white gallery
UUUUUU (The Last Laugh), 2023 — artwork by artist Bradly Brown. Copper-wire spiderweb holding a yellow squirting gag flower, spanning a gallery corner beneath a ceiling pipe
UUUUUU (The Last Laugh), 2023 — artwork by artist Bradly Brown. Copper-wire spiderweb holding a yellow squirting gag flower, installed in a gallery corner near an exit sign
UUUUUU, 2023 — artwork by artist Bradly Brown. Process shot of a hand-formed copper-wire spiderweb stretched across a white panel in the studio

Numbers 23:23, 2018

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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.

.– …. .- – / …. .- – …. / –. — -.. / .– .-. — ..- –. …. –

Numbers 23:23, 2018 — artwork by artist Bradly Brown
Numbers 23:23, 2018 — artwork by artist Bradly Brown
Numbers 23:23, 2018 — artwork by artist Bradly Brown
Numbers 23:23, 2018 — artwork by artist Bradly Brown

Partially Buried Cereal Aisle, 2013

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

Several Ways to Start a Fire, 2013

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Several Ways to Start a Fire, 2013
Twigs, rope, steel wool, 9v battery, magnifying glass, aluminum can, chocolate, underwear, close pins, condom, water, and hardware

Exhibited in For a Limited Time Only, MFA thesis exhibition, Moudy Gallery, Fort Worth, TX, 2013

Control of fire is one of the turning points of human evolution. It kept predators away, stretched the day past sunset, drew people together, and cooked the food that fed bigger brains. Several Ways to Start a Fire gathers the materials survivalists use to make fire: twigs, rope, steel wool, a 9-volt battery, a magnifying glass, an aluminum can, chocolate, cotton underwear, clothespins, and a water-filled condom.

Each object has been altered to pull it further from its everyday use, and the arrangement reads first as a formal composition. The piece works two ways: as an art object while there is a market to value it, and as a working survival kit if that market ever collapses. Making fire is part of what makes us human, and so is making, and admiring, things that have no practical use.

Several Ways to Start a Fire, 2013 — artwork by artist Bradly Brown
Several Ways to Start a Fire, 2013 — artwork by artist Bradly Brown
Several Ways to Start a Fire, 2013 — artwork by artist Bradly Brown
Several Ways to Start a Fire by Bradly Brown
Several Ways to Start a Fire, 2013 — artwork by artist Bradly Brown
Several Ways to Start a Fire, 2013 — artwork by artist Bradly Brown

Wonderwall, 2014

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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.

Wonderwall, 2014 — artwork by artist Bradly Brown


Escape Plan, 2012

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Escape Plan, 2012
Drafting compass, drywall, motor, hardware

Exhibited in Acceleration, Dallas Contemporary, Dallas, TX, 2013

Press: “Acceleration at Dallas Contemporary’s Alive for 35 Spans Generations”, Betsy Lewis, Dallas Observer, November 11, 2013

A drafting compass turns on a rod driven through the gallery wall, rotated once every thirty seconds by a rotisserie motor on the other side. A spring pulls the point into the drywall, so each pass cuts the circular groove a little deeper. Given enough time, the compass would cut all the way through the wall.

Escape Plan is about endurance and repetition: a small, pointless gesture repeated long enough leaves a real mark. Now and then the compass catches in its own groove and hesitates, and viewers find themselves rooting for it, a reminder of how quickly we empathize with something that struggles.

Escape Plan, 2012 — artwork by artist Bradly Brown
Escape Plan, 2012 — artwork by artist Bradly Brown
Escape Plan, 2012 — artwork by artist Bradly Brown
Escape Plan, 2012 — artwork by artist Bradly Brown

Damemoto (Nothing to Lose), 2012

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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
Damemoto (Nothing to Lose), 2012 — artwork by artist Bradly Brown. Wooden pier curving through the dark, outlined in string lights, with weeds growing from it
Damemoto (Nothing to Lose), 2012 — artwork by artist Bradly Brown. Clump of weeds growing from the planks of the wooden pier, lit from below
Damemoto (Nothing to Lose), 2012 — artwork by artist Bradly Brown. Low wooden pier stretching across the gallery floor in Hiroshima, edged with string lights

Transpacific, 2012

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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
Transpacific, 2012 — artwork by artist Bradly Brown
Transpacific, 2012 — artwork by artist Bradly Brown
Transpacific, 2012 — artwork by artist Bradly Brown
Transpacific, 2012 — artwork by artist Bradly Brown
Transpacific, 2012 — artwork by artist Bradly Brown

Purification Station, 2013

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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

Exhibited in Experiencing Perspectives, Mercedes-Benz Financial Services, Fort Worth, TX, 2013
Exhibited in For a Limited Time Only, Brown’s TCU MFA thesis exhibition, Fort Worth Contemporary Arts, Fort Worth, TX, 2013

An emergency water filter is meant to be scraped together from whatever is at hand: buckets, cinder blocks, sand, gravel, and charcoal. Purification Station rebuilds that system with a glossy pop finish, so it looks like something you could pick up at Target, and runs Trinity River water through pecan and rose charcoal, marble chips, and beach sand from Exotic Locations™.

Survivalism has become a lifestyle and a product category, fed by reality TV and recurring end-of-the-world headlines. The piece looks at how styling shapes what we believe an object can do, and how quickly survival tools turn into decoration. Like Several Ways to Start a Fire, it is an art object as long as the art market holds and a working tool if it doesn’t.

Purification Station, 2013 — artwork by artist Bradly Brown
Purification Station, 2013 — artwork by artist Bradly Brown
Purification Station, 2013 — artwork by artist Bradly Brown
Purification Station, 2013 — artwork by artist Bradly Brown
Purification Station, 2013 — artwork by artist Bradly Brown

15,540 Miles, 2002

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15,540 Miles, 2002
School desks, 444 No. 2 pencils, sawdust, pencil shavings, chalkboard, cyanotype on carpet
Variable dimensions

Exhibited at Conduit Gallery, Dallas, TX, 2002. This was Brown’s first commercial gallery exhibition.

Two school desks sat in the middle of the room. One was embedded with 444 No. 2 pencils. A single No. 2 pencil can, in theory, draw a line about 35 miles long, so together the 444 pencils could draw a line 15,540 miles long. The second desk sat beside it, buried in sawdust and pencil shavings. On the wall facing the desks hung a classroom chalkboard with a world map drawn on it, and the 15,540-mile line was plotted across the map, starting in Dallas and heading east.

The walls to the left and right held 64 portraits, 32 on each side, of Brown’s classmates from his elementary school yearbooks. For each portrait he cut a stencil and sprayed cyanotype photo emulsion onto a piece of carpet. The portraits were hung unexposed and kept under a black tarp until the opening reception. That night the tarp came off, and over the course of the evening the faces slowly appeared on the carpet as the emulsion reacted to the light.

The installation is about fear and pressure and the two ways people respond to them. Fear can push you to move, or its weight can hold you in place. Some people adapt and excel; others get buried.

15,540 Miles, 2002 — artwork by artist Bradly Brown. Installation view at Conduit Gallery: two school desks in front of a chalkboard world map, with carpet portraits on the side wall
15,540 Miles, 2002 — artwork by artist Bradly Brown. School desk buried in a mound of sawdust and pencil shavings
15,540 Miles, 2002 — artwork by artist Bradly Brown. School desk embedded with 444 upright No. 2 pencils
15,540 Miles, 2002 — artwork by artist Bradly Brown. Close-up of yellow No. 2 pencils rising from a school desk
15,540 Miles, 2002 — artwork by artist Bradly Brown. Grid of blue cyanotype portraits of elementary school classmates printed on carpet
15,540 Miles, 2002 — artwork by artist Bradly Brown. Close-up of a cyanotype yearbook portrait on carpet
15,540 Miles, 2002 — artwork by artist Bradly Brown. Detail of a cyanotype portrait emerging on carpet
15,540 Miles, 2002 — artwork by artist Bradly Brown. Black and white view of the two school desks, one buried in sawdust, beneath the chalkboard map

Side A, 2016

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Side A, 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” each

Side A is a single silicone mold cast from five different vinyl LPs. Silicone was poured over one record, peeled away, and laid onto the next, building up layer by layer, with each color of silicone marking a different record.

Resin records cast from the mold carry that layered information and can be played. The five LPs melt into one another, an abstraction of both image and sound, so the record sounds different depending on where the needle drops.

The piece grew out of Brown’s graphic design work for the experimental music label Table of the Elements, where every release came with its own creative project: silkscreens made from rust on car doors (see Impala Eardrums), record titles carved into guitars for Rhys Chatham’s Guitar Trio Is My Life!, and an album cover drawn on a chalkboard and photographed for Megafaun’s Bury the Square (see Donkey Punch). The work never stopped at the music. In the video Rowdy Rubber Records, Brown walks through the process.

Side A, 2016 — artwork by artist Bradly Brown
Side A, 2016 — artwork by artist Bradly Brown
Side A, 2016 — artwork by artist Bradly Brown
Side A, 2016 — artwork by artist Bradly Brown
Side A, 2016 — artwork by artist Bradly Brown
Side A, 2016 — artwork by artist Bradly Brown

Donkey Punch, 2008

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Donkey Punch, 2008
Mixed media on chalkboard
48″ x 72″

Donkey Punch is the album cover for Megafaun’s Bury the Square, released in 2008 on the experimental label Table of the Elements. Brown drew the image in mixed media on a chalkboard and then photographed it for the cover. He was also the art director and graphic designer for the release. Read the album’s review on Pitchfork.

The drawing is an illustrated picture of the music industry and works as a cautionary tale about the life of a touring musician. The donkey stands in for the nomadic life of the road: a tour bus loaded with everything you own. Snakes, bats and con men surround it, figures that show one face but turn out to have two. The traveler keeps moving forward anyway and finds a way through them. The music itself is the real weapon, but sometimes it needs backup: help from those who build the path. That’s the shotgun, marked “This Machine Kills Fascists,” the slogan Woody Guthrie wrote on his guitar.

Donkey Punch was one of several projects Brown made through his design work for the label, where several albums came with their own creative project. See also Impala Eardrums and Side A.

Donkey Punch, 2008 — artwork by artist Bradly Brown
Donkey Punch, 2008 — artwork by artist Bradly Brown
Donkey Punch, 2008 — artwork by artist Bradly Brown

HOMECOMING! COMMITTEE

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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 — HOMECOMING! Committee project with artist Bradly Brown

Launch Party, 2011

Hands on an Art Body, 2012 — HOMECOMING! Committee project with artist Bradly Brown

Hands on an Art Body, 2012

Post Communiqué, 2013 — HOMECOMING! Committee project with artist Bradly Brown

Post Communiqué, 2013

Friskt kopplat, hälften brunnet. (Quickly connected, half burned.), 2013 — HOMECOMING! Committee project with artist Bradly Brown

Friskt kopplat, hälften brunnet. (Quickly connected, half burned.), 2013

The Eagle Has Landed, 2013–2014 — HOMECOMING! Committee project with artist Bradly Brown

The Eagle has Landed, 2013–2014

MacGuffin, 2013–2014 — HOMECOMING! Committee project with artist Bradly Brown

MacGuffin, 2013-2014

PRESS:

Selected press, reviews, and recognition for HOMECOMING! Committee, 2011–2014, and later coverage of the collective’s work.

Recognition

Articles & Features

Audio & Video

semigloss. MAGAZINE

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(Please visit www.semiglossmag.com for more information)

semigloss. Magazine was a Texas-based arts publication founded by Sally Glass and Bradly Brown in 2012. The magazine highlighted international artists and writers and produced content that ranged from editorial and theoretical essays to interactive installations and vinyl records. Each issue focused on a certain concept or theme within the context of contemporary art thought and practice. Published for nearly 3 years, semigloss was intended to operate as a physical archive of the artistic idea but quickly expanded beyond the publication.

In 2016, the last issue, “Sound”, was released as a vinyl record with a corresponding immersive installation at the Contemporary Arts Museum of Houston, the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas, and B4BL4B in Oakland, as well as a listening event at the James Turrell Twilight Epiphany Skyspace at Rice University.

semigloss. Magazine — art direction by Bradly Brown

Volume 1 & 2: Issues and Events

semigloss. Magazine — art direction by Bradly Brown

SOUND, Issue #6

semigloss. Magazine — art direction by Bradly Brown

Press: Fort Worth Weekly, 2014

Attention Retention, 2012

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Attention Retention, 2012
Three floor fans and three 16″ beach balls

Exhibited in For a Limited Time Only, Brown’s TCU MFA thesis exhibition, Fort Worth Contemporary Arts, Fort Worth, TX, 2013. Named one of the Top Five Artworks in Fort Worth Weekly’s Best of Culture 2013.

Walking through Walmart one day, Brown saw about six people gathered around a product display. Under a sign reading “Clearance—High Velocity Floor Fans—$34,” a chrome fan pointed straight up on full blast, with a multicolored beach ball hovering in the air above it. Bernoulli’s principle keeps the ball in place: fast-moving air has lower pressure than still air, so the stream wraps around the ball, pushes it back to center whenever it drifts, and holds it aloft. It’s a trick many people remember from junior high physics or a children’s science museum.

What caught Brown’s attention wasn’t the trick but the shoppers, who stood transfixed. The display held people longer than most viewers spend with an artwork in a museum or gallery. Would the same device hold an audience the same way if it were presented as an art object? Could it work as a Duchampian readymade once it was moved into a gallery?

Attention Retention takes that question into the gallery as a kind of social experiment. Three floor fans sit in a row, each levitating a 16″ beach ball. The balls bob in a constant rhythm, filling the room with color and repetitive motion that is hypnotic, holding the viewer’s gaze while demanding attention.

In a world of media saturation and nonstop information, attention has become a sought-after commodity. One 2008 study found that the average attention span had dropped to five minutes, down from twelve a decade earlier. Placed in a gallery, the piece becomes a constant distraction that changes how the whole space is experienced. A moving object in a still room is a kind of seduction: even viewers who aren’t looking at it keep it in their peripheral vision or steal quick glances. That pull is a survival instinct. The brain reads movement in a quiet space as one of three things: a predator, a source of food, or a potential mate.

The repetitive bobbing also gives the beach balls a kind of personality, and viewers begin to relate to them as if they were alive. Attention Retention was part of For a Limited Time Only, Brown’s 2013 MFA thesis exhibition at TCU, which looked at how attention, behavior modification and the drive to survive shape everyday decisions. See also Escape Plan and Purification Station, which were shown in the same exhibition.

Attention Retention, 2012 — artwork by artist Bradly Brown. Three chrome floor fans in a row, each levitating a striped beach ball in the gallery
Attention Retention, 2012 — artwork by artist Bradly Brown. Three beach balls hovering above three floor fans against a white gallery wall