Brian Bixby

Witness
Brian Bixby, Witness, installation view, Viehauktionshalle, Marcel-Paul-Str. 57, 2014, Weimar, Germany. Materials: peep-hole, wood window frames, black and white Xerox prints, cardboard, tape, glue, fluorescent paint.

Brian Bixby is a contemporary American artist. His practice spans a broad range of media including sculpture, photography, neon, video, drawing, printmaking, and sound design.

Overview

Bixby makes installations, photographs and mixed media artworks. With the use of appropriated materials which are borrowed from a day-to-day context he uses traditional media and software to create exotic, psychedelic artworks of enormous range and complexity. Imagine the paint brush severed from cliché and all of its physical limitations, shaping a bold new visual language. His hyper-color and luminant compositions are anything but sterile computer experiments. They resemble sensitive, telescopic renderings of otherworldly life or natural atmospheric occurrences, an inherent naturalism permeating each piece. Bixby's installation works address space, context, and site.

Archeology, Excavation, and What Remains
Brian Bixby, Archeology, Excavation, and What Remains, installation view. Mixed media installation, 2012. Materials; wooden floor panels, red neon light, dirt, rocks.

His installations do not always reference recognizable forms. The results are deconstructed to the extent that meaning is shifted and possible interpretation becomes multifaceted. By applying abstraction, he presents everyday objects as well as references to texts, painting and architecture. Categories are subtly reversed. He creates situations in which everyday objects are altered or detached from their natural function. By applying specific combinations and certain manipulations, different functions and/or contexts are created. By using popular themes such as sexuality, family structure and violence, he touches various overlapping themes and strategies. Several reoccurring subject matters can be recognized, such as the relation with popular culture and media, working with repetition, provocation and the investigation of the process of expectations.

In 2006 Bixby received a Professional Development Grant from Creative Capital, New York, New York, USA. In 2012 Bixby created a series of photos of the Mall of America for writer Marc Berdet's lecture and publication about Walter Benjamin.[1] This work was first exhibited at KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin. Archeology, Excavation, and What Remains was a temporary installation in a house before it was renovated in Weimar, Germany. The installation is an entire set design in a full size room that can only be viewed through a looking glass. This project was presented as part of the Provocative Architecture program at the Bauhaus University, Weimar.[2]

Works from Bixby have screened internationally at venues such as the Cannes Film Festival / International Critic’s Week, the Austin Museum of Digital Art, the Santa Fe Art Institute, and the Center for Contemporary Arts, Santa Fe. Bixby's works are included in private collections in the United States and Europe.

See also

Notes

  1. ↑ "Anthropologischer & aleatorischer Materialismus", KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin
  2. ↑ Archeology, Excavation, and What Remains, Bauhaus Universität, Weimar

References

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