Brendan Fowler

New Pictures, Bench and Six Sampler Works

April 24 – May 30, 2015

So, the first work you were really known for was performance, and then you became known for sculptures involving framed photographs, but for the last year or so you have primarily been showing these newer sort of embroidered pictures. Where did they come from?
 
In 2013 I did something I had long dreamed about but never thought possible, which was to start making a new kind of picture with an industrial embroidery machine, the one that typically embroiders the logos of sports teams and labor unions and corporations on jackets and hats and jerseys. The embroidery machine itself is a modern, industrialized grandchild of folk craft techniques as they were translated into practical applications and then updated to mass purposes. I guess I'm taking them back a few steps towards a folk craft, repurposing them for these sort of weavings that this generation of machines were not designed to make. These pictures start as photographs made with a regular Olympus point and shoot digital camera and continue my long running engagement with photography as a way to process and present personal narrative. I have come to see that there is a lot of similarity in the procedures by which these come to be as those of the "straight photographs" which in the past I produced as standard inkjet prints and put into sculptures. But rather than the image coming out of an inkjet printer, these images become something more like a painting, with the selections of thread color and image arrangement, as well as the machine's various errors manifesting more physically, and, to be honest, treated as gesture and choice the way I would imagine one would treat those factors when using paint. The thread gets thick, there is topography like on a raised relief map. These are textured and physical, in reproduction they flatten down a bit, but in person they declare their connection to the body more readily, their process is legible as the same process that put the name on your jersey. Because they are made on canvas that has been primed with acrylic paint and stretched on aluminum painting stretchers they could be paintings — technically they are paintings, probably — as much as they are weavings or embroideries, but I've been getting lumped into photography conversations for a little bit without totally trying to — the camera was always a practical tool for me — and for whatever reason this is the first time that I have really felt confident about presenting something as a photograph. To split the difference and keep things open I’m referring to them “pictures.” 
 
Some of your more recent “pictures” involve a kind of layering which is reminiscent of your past sculptural works.
 
The apparel industry standard digitizing software costs fifteen thousand dollars and is only available for Windows based computers, so suffice to say I have been using this kind of cheaper amateur software that’s geared more for the home hobbyist who may or may not engage with quilting, so it comes with this pretty extensive quilting motif library that I’ve been sort of flipping out about and trying to figure out what to do with. It has ducks and saws and leaves and empty circles, and they all feel so aggressive to me (both laugh). At the same time, and without really thinking about the quilting motifs, I was looking for this inkjet printable polyester for a few months and once I found it, suddenly the quilting motifs had a use for me. The polyester is really thin and has an open weave so it can seem more or less translucent depending on how you layer it, and it lends itself well to a kind of collaging, and these line-art based quilting motifs allow you to add a sort of graphic layer without really losing any of the inkjet print beneath it. But there is an extra similarity that I have noticed between this process and the older crash pieces you were refereeing to, which is that the just like with those, where one frame would piece the others and hold them together — or at least appear to — here the thread goes through the prints and the canvas, sewing the layers together and again the image and content becomes actual armature. The image itself creates the physical structure. 
 
Do you think about this as performing?
 
Well, I think about how it performs, in that it is literally performing a function, or several.
 
So then maybe not with these new pictures, but in terms of performance, you have been making them more frequently again, and you have also figured out a way to set up a sort of performance that can happen without you.
 
I never quit making performances, but I have gone through phases where I perform more or less frequently, and a constant has been that the relationship between my performance and my object outputs never felt as strong to me as I felt it could. The two always felt sort of vaguely complimentary but still separate until I acquired my first industrial embroidery machine, and I was struck by how similar it was to the Roland SP-404 sampler which I have long used in making performances and sound works. With the embroidery machine you program the movements of 15 different needles which are threaded with colors of your choosing, while with the sampler you program 12 samples on 10 different banks of your choosing. With both tools you input sets of information and then have a set group of operations with which to manipulate it. Both seem sort of fixed but what I love about both devices is how they leave great space for improvising. Working with these two different tools, I feel the same parts of my brain engaged. Before I started using the the embroidery machines, before I even knew that I would use them, I was making these compositions with the sampler that sounded to me how I would eventually discover the embroideries to look, to feel. My experience with each machine has informed my work with the other immensely, and at this point I see them as equivalents.
 
You found the connection you were looking for. 
 
Yes, and without even knowing that I was looking! So, In live performances I have been using these samplers as an instrumental back-up largely for the fact that you can randomize the sounds, get things going in a very unpredictable, Cage-y, random sort of way. From this, I have recently begun figuring out that I can make sound pieces, collages, that are ever evolving, randomized, and sort of self performing by programming a sequence of loops of varied lengths that someone else can activate with simple instructions. At the start I know what the elements are, but they will never sync up the same way twice, thereby performing a different score every time the machine is set going. These sound pieces offer both a soundtrack to the embroideries as well as another take on what I consider to be the same sort of procedure, one that isn’t fixed, but rather keeps moving, realizing the improvisational potentials ad infinitum.
 
While the course of the compositions are left to chance, you have been very specific thus far about who performs them.
 
Right. Well, actually, I haven’t yet addressed any of the performers as performers, but rather selected certain people within the two contexts in which the pieces were shown and asked them to “operate” the pieces. I’m not sure that they are performers. I very much appreciate their willingness to participate, but I think that I think of them kind of more as conditions than as performers, for the fact that a person other than me chooses which composition is activated and when and for how long it plays takes things further out of my hands, offering another level of randomness to the piece. I am, though, as you said, choosing specifically who I ask to operate them based on the context. Recently I showed one of these sampler pieces at MIT’s List Art Center and only the docents were allowed to operate it. It was set up with six different compositions that they could turn on and off and select to their tastes. The pieces would never repeat regardless of how long they were on for —they begun when the docents chose and ended when they chose. No one else in the institution had the training or capability to change them, leaving the typically powerless museum docents a great deal of agency to direct the exhibition as they saw fit. They were the ones that had to spend the most time with the piece, the ones that really had the burden of listening to it all day, so I wanted them to have say in how they heard it, which compositions they heard and when they heard them. I also tried to present a selection of different moods, so if the one got too annoying, hopefully another one would feel better. Then I showed the same piece at Richard Telles in Los Angeles and the piece was operated by the gallery’s director, Max Maslansky. The sampler sat on his desk next to his computer, and he turned the various compositions on and off as he chose.  
 
In your exhibition at CAPITAL in San Francisco you are showing this sound piece as well as new pictures?
 
Yeah, I’m actually showing the same sound piece as was shown at MIT and at Telles — I thought it made sense to “tour” it, see how it sounds in these different rooms, as operated by these different people — with two new pictures and a bench.