Brendan Fowler

Brendan Fowler

Work from his oeuvre

“I have worked for other artists and in galleries but have never been employed as anyone who writes condition reports. As such, I am often surprised to see very detailed reports for my sculptures when they are transported that read like ‘frame is piercing other frame / plexi is cracked in 5 places / work is broken’ etc. All of these moments that I’m sort of laboriously faking with these things art transporters will often very meticulously catalog, which I know that they must do to protect their ends, lest it should appear that they picked up 4 photographs from the gallery which somehow made it into this sculptural collision on the ride over to whomever they are delivering the work to. Joel and I started to joke about taking them literally — work is broken here, here and here — and then wondering what if these condition reports were really cover ups to cover the shippers accidents with the work? Who are these fucked up shippers breaking these perfectly fine framed photographs? We always joke that we have shipper problems.

A few years ago I made monochrome versions of my usual sort of pieces by silkscreening solid purple over the inkjet prints before they were framed and as well over the fronts of the frames themselves. How my work functions typically, or engages within histories of painting or sculpture, or considerations of how this body of work functions differently within those histories aside, we were joking about what kind of crazy fucked up shipper would pick up these four photographs and on the way to delivering them not only get them jammed into this sculpture, but would some how get the whole thing purple? That shipper would have to be fired, right? No, man, they’re going to jail!

Part of making the purple ones initially was to recycle the test prints and ‘bad’ prints and ‘mis-stained’ frames that occurred as byproduct from my regular working (these were the elements I printed over with solid purple), but more so I was curious to find out how these kind of image dependent sculptures would function if all the imagery was exhausted out of them, or literally blocked in, buried under, painted over. I chose purple the first time because it is my favorite color, and tried to match the shade to the color of smoothie I had been making every morning before going to work (…literally a choice based on taste…sorry… ). All told, I liked how the purple monochromes functioned and I wanted to make another set of monochromes, but another color this time. Black seemed a logical choice given how much I have been making work around/involving/dependent on the mirroring effects generated by framing dark images behind regular, glossy, UV plexiglass, turning the image into a mirror. Black’ed out ones could bring up a whole other set of questions. Is blacking out more something than purpling out? Less? Are these ‘murdered out’? (Technically, yes). Does the content in fact glare back at you with its eyes closed like an angry cartoon child in the very bright sun? Arms crossed, ‘hmmph’ing out? And what about this other color, the third set of monochromes, it is kind of like a different purple, different berry. Full disclosure, I’m not very good at seeing color.”