The American artist Brian Alfred (b. 1974) is best known for paintings, collages and animations which examine the ways in which perception of our surroundings and culture is mediated by technology. His works present a flattened, depopulated and predominantly urban world derived from found images. His thematic concerns - including the signifiers of Modernist idealism and technological progress, conspiracy theories and the growing prevalence of surveillance in the post-9/11 world - have led him to focus on images featuring architecture, machinery, interiors and urban landscapes. However, he has also explored ways in which to recalibrate the cliched tropes of romanticism - a sunset, cherry blossom or a shooting star - for the twenty-first century. The world as depicted by Alfred is distanced, banal yet highly charged with possible meanings.
As Aaron Betsky has suggested: ‘In a world dominated by images that promise a great deal, delight the senses and scare the hell out of us. All art can do is to show the flatness of that promise, of those compositions, and of the world around us. And this is what Brian Alfred does. His world is flat. His surfaces are impenetrable.’ The mass media enacts the first flattening of both our perceived world and lived experience. Working from photographs, Alfred defines the essential forms present in an image with the aid of a computer - a process of reduction and abstraction as well as, perversely, focussing - before rendering the forms as carefully calibrated colour fields in animation or acrylic (it is worth noting that despite their formally precise sources Alfred’s collages and paintings have a very handmade and crafted tactility to them). Thus in the finished works the artist’s hand is at more than one remove. Presenting non-judgemental renderings of surface, of flatness, and of shape, Alfred leaves conclusions concerning paranoia or politics, the manifold meanings of his images, to the beholder. ‘His task,’ suggests Betsky, ‘as somebody who has dedicated himself to making and not just consuming images, is to use the logic by which our visual culture works, which is seduction mixed with blandness that allows the information to reach as wide an audience as possible, against the flatness itself.’
Alfred’s latest project represents a significant departure from his previous practice by placing the creative individual within society as the focus. Millions Now Living Will Never Die!!! maps the many and diverse creative influences that act upon the artist in the form of 333 portraits of musicians, artists, actors, writers and politicians. The project proposes that personal creativity can be understood as a potentially open and affective process, as the chain of influence extends from artist to artist, from generation to generation. The project thus provides a map or index of Alfred’s creative development, and could also be understood as a form of expanded self-portraiture.
Brian Alfred lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. He has exhibited widely internationally. Recent solo exhibitions include Studio La Citta, Verona (2009), Haunch of Venison, Berlin (2008), SCAI The Bathhouse, Tokyo (2007), Haunch of Venison, Zurich (2006), Haunch of Venison, London (2005) and Phoenix Art Museum (2004). He was recently included in group exhibitions at the Contemporary Art Centre Museum, Cincinnati, the Shizuoka Prefecture Museum of Art, Shizuoka, Japan (both 2008) the Guggenheim Museum, New York and the Palazzo delle Papesse, Sienna (both 2007). Alfred's work is included in many collections including the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Guggenheim Museum, Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Denver Art Museum, National Gallery of Victoria, Australia, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
