 Troops banner, 2004 Paper, 23.5 x 30.5 cm Brian Alfred Conspiracy? Brian Alfred (born Pittsburgh in 1973, lives and works in New York) is an emerging artist known for his works that engage with the nature of contemporary society that is dominated by digital media. "Conspiracy?", Alfred's first solo show in the UK, presents paintings, collages and a video animation of cityscapes, landscapes and interiors that refer to some of the many different corporate and government conspiracy theories that circulate in our information-saturated culture. Gathered from the media and the internet, the paintings titles refer to phenomenon, as in "Crop Circles", 2004, as well as specific events, for example "Watergate", a streetscape of the infamous building from 2004. Alfred's works remain ambivalent as to whether any of the theories are true. However the absence of human life in the works brings to mind the sinister implications of their possible truth, as well as the paranoid beliefs about the lengths that government and corporations go to hide their truth from the public. The five paintings in the exhibition are on a large-scale, meticulously constructed, with large planes of uniform colour and hard-edges. The crisp, matte, surface keeps the viewer's eye aware of the picture plane. Alfred simultaneously created the images in this exhibition as paintings, paper collages and digital images. The digital images were then used to create a new video animation entitled "Conspiracy", 2004. By animating the images in the paintings, Alfred encourages them to be read as sequences from a film and asks us to suspend our disbelief while we experience the animated conspiracies. The work is accompanied by electronic music produced and written by Opiate (Thomas Knak) that enhances the mood created by the images. Alfred graduated from Yale University with an MFA in 1999 and has since had solo shows in New York, Los Angeles and at the Phoenix Art Museum in Arizona. Alfred's work is represented in many important collections including the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. "Conspiracy?" is accompanied by a CD-ROM catalogue that includes an essay by Tom Morton. Exhibition: 3 March - 2 April, 2005 Opening hours: Mon-Fri 10 am - 6 pm, Thu 10 am - 7 pm, Sat 10 - 5 pm Haunch of Venison 6 Haunch of Venison Yard GB-London, W1K 5ES Telephone +44 (0)20 7495 5050 Fax +44 (0)20 7495 4050 Email calum@haunchofvenison.com www.haunchofvenison.com |
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