Tag: North Set Residency

Spider Webs, 2017
Cyanotype on canvas
16.5″w x 20”h

Exhibited in Image for Concept: Indirect Representation in Photography, Southeast Museum of Photography, Daytona State College, Daytona Beach, FL, 2019, and The Hand Art Center, Stetson University, DeLand, FL, 2020

In Spider Webs, the computer monitor becomes a camera lucida. Working from photographs, Brown redraws each web by hand on screen, recognizing every thread while staying true to the original image.

The digital drawings are then printed as cyanotypes on canvas. The frayed edges of the canvas make each piece unique, yet the image itself is infinitely reproducible. Like the cliché verre, the 19th-century process of printing hand-drawn glass plates on photographic paper, the work asks how an art object is valued: what is a physical object worth compared to the digital information that defines it?

Spider Webs was made in 2017 during the North Set Residency in Houston, organized by Bea Ying Projects in a vacant commercial building that had once been a title loan office. In that setting the webs took on another meaning: they reference how title loan and other short-term lending companies can trap people in cycles of debt that are hard to escape, all in the pursuit of paradise, or the American Dream. The series was made alongside Title Loan, a group of cyanotypes on canvas from the same residency.

The series grows out of Brown’s larger interest in the blurring line between our physical and digital surroundings. Across installation, sculpture, photography and video, his work looks at how technology shapes our decisions, both enhancing and disrupting our sense of independence, and invites viewers to weigh its potential against its pitfalls and its effect on cultural and individual identity.

The web returns as a subject in UUUUUU (2023), a spiderweb hand-formed from copper wire stripped from internet cable.

Cyanotype on canvas of an orb spider web radiating from its center, from Spider Webs (2017) by Bradly Brown

Cyanotype on canvas of a dense, circular spider web, from Spider Webs (2017) by Bradly Brown

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.