Brian Bress:

Make Your Own Friends

Brian Bress: Make Your Own Friends surveyed the last ten years of Brian Bress’s practice and brought together video, sculpture, and works on paper for the first time. Bress often uses the devices of painting, drawing, and sculpture to create his videos. He is a multimedia artist in the truest sense of the term: he brings the distinct features of each medium to bear on the others. These works also reveal his innovative ways of opening up his work to address the viewer directly, rather than observing traditional boundaries separating artist and audience. Bress’s videos, in particular, suggest a heightened awareness that we not only look at the screen but that we too are being looked at. As the title for this exhibition suggests, Bress created a wildly imaginative group of characters and it is through them that he makes friends with us, the viewer.

Brian Bress was born in 1975 in Norfolk, Virginia. He received his BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1998 and his MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2006. His work has been exhibited at the Akron Art Museum, Ohio; Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; Baltimore Museum of Art, Maryland; Public Art Fund, New York; and Centre d'Art Contemporain Geneva, Switzerland, among others. Bress lives and works in Los Angeles.