NEWPORT BEACH, CA.- The Orange County Museum of Art presents the work of Los Angeles-based artist Brian Bress. One of the most innovative, cross-disciplinary artists working today, Bress is known for his fictional characters inspired by 1980s children’s television programming, exotic world cultures, and historical art movements. His artworks blend painting, sculpture, performance, and video, blurring the distinctions between these traditional definitions. Presenting videos, works on paper, and sculpture, Brian Bress: Make Your Own Friends was curated by Whitney Tassie, of the Utah Museum of Fine Arts (UMFA), and Nora Burnett Abrams, at the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver and is on view August 6–December 4, 2016.
Brian Bress: Make Your Own Friends offers an in-depth look at the last ten years of Bress’s practice. Bringing together his video, sculpture, and works on paper for the first time, the exhibition is the most significant presentation of the L.A. artist’s work to date. Born as doodles or collages, his imaginative figures take shape as sculptural costumes and come to life on video, performed in front of elaborately composed backdrops.
“Bress’s work, which is at once wonderfully witty and deeply complex, is rooted in art historical traditions and offers a contemporary lens through which to view important formal and ideological threads of Modernism,” stated OCMA Senior Curator Cassandra Coblentz. “It is exciting that Bress’s work is on view concurrent with modern work from The Phillips Collection, as viewers will have the opportunity to make their own connections between the two exhibitions and reflect on how artistic practices have evolved over time.”
In the past ten years, Brian Bress has created countless characters and eccentric weirdos out of makeup and wigs, pencil and paper, scissors and glue, upholstery foam and paint, canvas and camera. His fictional anthropomorphic characters are bizarre and slightly off-kilter. But they are also friendly. They are perplexing yet endearing, relatable yet unlike anything you’ve ever seen. Bress draws from both pop culture and high culture, applying familiar attributes of children’s television and fine art to his multimedia works.
While many of the works in Brian Bress: Make Your Own Friends have a video component, Bress doesn’t think of himself as a video artist. He moves fluidly between two- and three-dimensional media as well as static and time-based art forms. Sculpture performs in videos. Videos read as paintings. Paintings become costumes. Drawings manifest on camera. The artist’s lack of loyalty to a specific type of image-making gives him freedom to explore ideas unfettered by ideology.
His work challenges the definition of traditional art forms as well as the perceived rules of museum visitor experience. Imposter (2009) demonstrates this point clearly, as he began by making a collage, which then became a sculpture, which, in turn was used in the production of a video and also an inkjet print. Imposter exists as four different works, each of which presses upon the boundaries of its medium. The collage flattens textures as much as it alerts us to the different materials, the print suggests that it is a reproduction of a sculpture rather than a still from the video, the sculpture celebrates a messier handling than the print suggests; and the video conjoins all of these other medium-specific qualities, including that of painting, as it suggests a keen alertness to the boundary of the frame.
References to modern art recur throughout Bress’s work in both form and subject. Fancy Dress Ball (Brian) (2012) brings to life the gestures of abstraction’s pioneers such as Wallily Kandinsky and El Lissitzky, and even later masters such as Roy Lichtenstein with his thickly outlined graphic forms.
370 Cover (2015), a six-channel video installation, represents Bress’s most direct engagement with a specific work from art history, Sol LeWitt’s Wall Drawing #370: Ten Geometric Figures (including right triangle, cross, X, diamond) (1982). Liberating painting from a support structure such as a canvas or wood panel, LeWitt pioneered the move to make one’s mark directly on the wall itself. If LeWitt’s wall drawing engages directly with the surface of the wall, then Bress’s work engages provocatively with the fourth wall. Silently choreographed, Bress situates (???) each panel so that it may be “cut into” a geometric shape, and in doing so, he also cuts into the dividing wall between viewer and actor. And once again, drawing becomes sculpture becomes video—and, contained within a frame, it even approaches painting. In this sense, 370 Cover culminates Bress’s decade-long creative approach that incessantly borrows the means of one medium in order to augment or strengthen another.
