BIOGRAPHY
b. 1975, Norfolk, USA. Live and works in Los Angeles, USA

Brian Bress’s time based media works have been described as inventive, humorous, and “discomfortingly complex.” As an inventive form of portraiture, they employ flat-screen monitors, which make his works appear to be conventional photographs or even paintings, each depicting one or more figures rendered abstract through the use of masks and costumes.

MAN WITH CIGARETTE, 2016
For the Biennale de l’Image en Mouvement, Bress creates a four panel video wall, presenting a life-size full figure portrait that replicates in three dimensions (as a costume) a found pen and ink drawing of a man in a full dress suit smoking a cigarette. The style of the found drawing being replicated is full of awkward details, bad perspective and impossible forms. As in past works Bress draws on two-dimensional sources, such as Sol Lewitt’s Dazzle Camouflage, as well as his own collages, and sets out on the impossible task of bringing what can only exist in two dimensions into three dimensions and then compressing it back down to two dimensions using the video screen.

[MAMCO]