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.