“We’re all sort of like decorator crabs.”

On September 15th, Brian Bress, a Norfolk-born and Los Angeles-based contemporary artist, hosted a “Meet The Artist” event at the Chrysler Museum of Art, which we attended.  Though we were the two youngest attendees, Bress’ lighthearted humor resonated within the entire audience, no matter the age.

During his presentation, he explained how he viewed his works as “paintings that move.”  Bress manipulates costume and setting to create absurd and eccentric looped images, like “Man With a Cigarette” (pictured below.)

“Man With a Cigarette (on black)” includes four flat-screen monitors that depict a black and white man in a suit, loosely holding a cigarette in his left hand.  Bress uses a two-dimensional medium but creates the illusion of a three-dimensional figure in order to create tension between the flatness of the screens and the depth of the images they portray.  Each monitor shows sections of the body moving at different paces.  This is to show the precision of digital media along with the nature of human gestures.  Bress adapted the idea from a pen-and-ink drawing he spotted in a thrift store that he describes as  “an artist’s love letter to drawing.”  He decided to recreate it as a life-sized costume, and thus “Man With a Cigarette” was created.

He also creates absurd short films that induce slight discomfort.  At the “Meet The Artist” event, he displayed his short film, “Can You See Me?”, which features him in red face paint, babbling about sporks.  For the duration of approximately three minutes, he demands the audience to close their eyes with him and he asks, “If I close my eyes, can you see me?”  He also presented, “Status Report,” a faux-documentary style film about a boxer with a gigantic nose and an aggressive coal miner.  Though most find these films to be funny and odd, Bress enjoys letting his creativity roam free.  He remarked, “It was satisfying to me to not feel like I’m following some preset… It’s great to plan, but in the end you have to let go and trust that if you give chaos, it will let the work breathe.”

He proceeded to show the audience a picture of a naked decorator crab.  He explained how decorator crabs use a sticky substance to attach pieces of foliage to their bodies, so they may camouflage to their surroundings.  He then showed us a picture of a decorator crab with pieces of ribbon and decorative accessories attached to its body.  Bress then likened decorator crabs to artists, collage artists in particular.   He said that he gets his ideas from decorator crabs, and he is inspired by things in the real world that are amazing and reflect upon something about humanity and who we are as people, in a simple way.

“WOWMOM” (below) is a high-definition video with three monitors that hang on the wall, like paintings.  The video begins with an image of a mountain landscape and proceeds with striped, muppet-like figures carving letters through the image to create the end result, “WOWMOM”.

The event concluded with a Q&A.  Overall, we immensely enjoyed seeing a successful, local artist, and we hope to see artist individuals from our generation achieve as much as Bress has.