'The way we see images and objects is changing'
Dense Hands, Thick Clouds (detail), by Brendan Flanagan. | Images courtesy of the artist
Two years ago, Brendan Flanagan, MFA 2014, received the Claudine and Stephen Bronfman Fellowship in Contemporary Art. The fellowship is awarded annually to two students graduating from a master’s or PhD program in the visual or media arts, one from UQAM and the other from Concordia. As part of the prize, fellows have the opportunity to show their work in a solo exhibition.
We caught up with this emerging artist, whose exhibition Dense Hands, Thick Clouds runs at the FOFA Gallery until May 27, 2016, to see how his career and creative practice have changed since receiving the prestigious award.
How has the Bronfman Fellowship played a role in your career?
Brendan Flanagan: It has been instrumental in affording me space and time over the past couple of years. I feel like it’s given me the time to create a body of research that I can build on in the years to come. The fellowship is very well thought out, affording researchers specific funds for travelling, studio and living expenses as well as providing an opportunity to teach and be involved in the Faculty of Fine Arts as a researcher. It has been a great honour to be a part of such a supportive and discerning research opportunity.
What is your background?
I studied at the Ontario College of Art and Design University, graduating with my bachelors in painting in 2007. After that I lived in Toronto and Berlin, working on my painting practice and gradually changing direction. I became concerned with how images are constructed and used in pop culture, filtered through a history of painting. Later my work shifted to a focus on histories of abstraction and the materiality of paint.
What are you working on right now?
The last few years I have been researching objects and images that are designed with digital software. The past decades have seen the processes of digital software increasingly used for all aspects of design and architecture, but we have now come to a point where the tools that were once used for commercial applications and were highly specialized are available for free and for personal use.
As these tools filter out into our culture, the way we see objects and images changes. However, my own work is not specifically about digital output; it’s handmade — so there is a play between what we expect to be a digital print, but has the marks of handmade production.
My most recent projects have been installation and sculpture based, but I am currently working on a new suite of paintings inspired by my research into modes of production and types of virtual and real space. Basically I want to collapse the work I’ve been doing into the space of the canvas, as I feel painting affords a certain poetic reading that was overlooked when people were confronted with the objecthood of sculpture and the space of installation.
What works have your attention right now?
Most recently I’ve become interested in the places where technology and the poetic impulse intersect. In particular, the Eric Davis book Techgnosis has interested me for its prescient look at technology in the 1990s, realizing that as technologies uproot from our own ability to understand the basics of their conception, the closer they come to becoming objects of religious-like authority and aura.
What communities do you feel most connected to or engaged by?
Although my research takes me across many disciplines and I have broad interests, I’ve begun to realize my education and years as a painter have strongly influenced my viewpoint as a researcher and creator.
Even when I’m not painting there is a connective aesthetic viewpoint that comes from painting that I believe roots me in how I conceptualize information. Outside of the painting community I’m also interested in consumer technology and the communities that these technologies breed.
I grew up at a time just on the edge of the “digital native” and look both forward and backward to how these ways of interacting and seeing are influencing our lives.
Flanagan’s “Dense Hands, Thick Clouds” runs at the FOFA Gallery until May 27, 2016.
Read about the 2016 Bronfman Fellows.
