The Up and Comers: Brian Twilley
With so many art galleries featuring recent graduate shows, we couldn't resist scouring the walls for a few of our choice picks. Today we begin a brief series featuring local artists who look prepared to make some strong waves in the art world.
Growing up in Annapolis, Maryland, Brian Twilley was always pulled towards the visual arts and, particularly, photography. "Miserable" as a business major, he quickly switched to fine arts and never looked back. He recently completed the MFA program at The George Washington University, with a final project titled Stills, featuring a collection of mesmerizing, pixelated videos. You can see two pieces from that show on display until this Saturday at Conner Contemporary Art for its Academy 2006 student exhibition. Twilley took a moment to speak with DCist about his work, which you can also find on his Web site.
You work in so many types of media, including video, digital prints, and installations. What do you like about these various media? How do you use them to express yourself in different ways?
My practice is primarily conceptually driven; to that end I certainly have a bias towards work that hides the artist’s hand. So much of what I have produced exists as data on a computer or as notes and essays. Jean Baudrillard, Noam Chomsky, and Paul Virilio have heavily influenced my ideological development along with Bruce Nauman and Joseph Beuys.
Installation and video/sound work is very temporal for me. In a way, it only exists when being shown in the context of a gallery. That is something that drew me to new media. While I have no desire to fill a studio with art objects, the art world is a commodity driven market, and I feel that I must have something tangible to show for my efforts. In a perfect world I’d like to be working in a manner similar to Oliver Herring or Rirkrit Tiravanija. I enjoy producing work but also see the futility in adding more noise to a culture already full of stimuli.
Chaos is a frequent theme in your work, from your Urban Decay digital prints to your most recent videos. Why do you seek this out with your art, and how are you trying to capture it?
I don’t actually seek chaos out, though I do admit that I channel it in my work. I think that a contemporary artist should act like a filter, synthesizing elements of contemporary culture into a forum that others can experience sensorially. So perhaps, for a moment, a viewer who experiences my work sees a different reality than their own. My reality is not necessarily more real than someone else’s, but rather a different one within a sea of sameness.
Visual artists are on the leading edge of cultural change, and that is something that keeps contemporary art relevant. It is the job of the artist to push cultural boundaries, to make the un-makeable, to ask the un-askable. That is not to say that I see myself as a sage bearing some ultimate truth about the world, but I do try to peel back some of the polished veneer.
Many of your pieces, especially in your series Fear and Violence, contemplate the absurdity of government safety proclamations during a time of, well, fear and violence. Would you describe any of your works as political?
Generally I would not say that my work is politically motivated, but having a studio a few blocks from the White House forces you to confront the reality of a country at war. I think I got tired of sipping lattes at Starbucks while people my age were, are, being blown apart by IED’s in Iraq. I was trying to work through some of that frustration of feeling impotent. Academia no longer has the power that it did in the late 1960’s, it’s been castrated. I think I’m part of an entire generation that feels powerless to confront the powerful. I’m very proud of that cycle of work and I think it is unfortunate that I was never able to find anyone willing to show it. Two years after I produced that body of work I still feel that it is relevant to our current social climate.
The two videos showing at Conner, Marsh (pictured) and Devil's Cauldron, are arguably two of your more sedate pieces, especially within Stills. Will you tell us a little more about this series and how these two pieces fit within it?
They certainly are sedate by comparison. Those two pieces were meant to act as a counter balance to the cacophony of Bombs Bursting and Planes (two other videos in my MFA show). The series explores the erosion of a discernible ‘reality effect’ within our culture. I’m very interested in how we define something as ‘real’ and how we define ‘real’ itself. Time is also an important element to the work. Technology and globalization have allowed us to exist in a culture where time is no longer absolute. The videos make heavy use of sampling, looping, and synthesized sound.
The goal of the series was to create an actual environment for the viewer to experience with multiple senses. There are moments when watching a movie that you forget that you are in fact watching a movie but then something else ultimately snaps you out of the illusion of cinema. This push and pull between illusion and reality was always present while developing the show. Compared to the pieces at Conner, Bombs Bursting and Planes are almost overwhelming. A common feeling among those who were able to see the entire installation at George Washington was one of anxiety and uncertainty.
What are you working on now, and how would you like to see your art evolve in the future?
Over the summer my partner and I moved to Portland, Oregon so that she could enroll in Reed College’s graduate program. I’ve recently been able to get back into the studio and have started to focus on real-time sound and video production. I’m still interested in creating an environment for a viewer to enter into, but I’d like the installation to be more variable. I’ve been working with a new computer platform, popular with dance club DJ’s, that allows me to synchronize video with audio in a real-time and dynamically alterable environment.
There is a lot of interest for me in developing work that continually challenges the viewer’s perception of time and reality. And, if it becomes more performative in nature and less object oriented, all the better.