Tag: pencils

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

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