Brian Alfred by Miles McEnery Gallery

BRIAN ALFRED

BRIAN ALFRED ESCAPE PLAN

525 West 22nd Street New York NY 10011

511 West 22nd Street New York NY 10011

520 West 21st Street New York NY 10011

UNCANNY!ABSENCES By Stephen Westfall

Brian Alfred’s paintings and videos are seemingly serene explorations of a pictorial tradition of flatness (in the portrayal of landscape and city life from the street)—a tradition that extends back to Ukiyo-e prints and the resulting Japonisme movement in nineteenth-century France, and forward through such contemporary iterations as the paintings of Allan D’Arcangelo and Alex Katz.

I say “seemingly” because part of their frisson arises from an anxiety—a shadow of doubt de!ly imbedded in Alfred’s compositions that insinuates all is not quite in order, or even present. We can a"ribute this unease to the whisper of abandonment that a"ends the world as Alfred presents it. But “frisson” implies an ambiguity generating a peculiar pleasure, and pleasure indeed delays and ameliorates the slowly ratcheting discomposure that a viewer might feel over the absence of human or animal figures. The pleasure arises from the satisfying solidity and stretch of the artist’s cra!, as is evident in the surfaces and joinery of Alfred’s shapes and colors; in the color itself, quiet but pitch perfect in invoking light and space; and also in the memory of the burnished shorthand of iconic graphic design, particularly those silkscreens of national and state parks that establish a flat shadowed foreground of trees and rocks with equally flat backgrounds of crepuscular peaches and blues to indicate contemplative sunsets. The evenness establishes a reassuring solidity in the face of solitude, and there is the sense that the silhoue"ed shadow contains volumes. Working primarily in acrylic, Alfred uses tape to mask oﬀ his o!en intricate areas of color, but he will occasionally confound expectations of a flat chromatic consistency in his paint surfaces by

wielding a spray gun to create cloudy eﬀects or so!er emanations of light. This happens in the grand-scaled triptych The Great Falls (2021), where mist, literally “spray,” rises above the foam and floats a luminescent veil between the foam and rock outcropping in the foreground and the wall of water and darker plateau behind. In Fire Sky (2021), the vapors are smoke rather than mist and are created in washes guided by a foam brush. These clouds stem from an ominously illuminated central vanishing point to the right of the red sun that billows into the foreground space of advancing, still-forested ridges and the dark mass of a modernist house with long, blacked-out, but reflective picture windows, which is at an oblique perspectival angle to the picture plane. The blankness of the house and windows imply that its owners have either evacuated the area or are otherwise absent as smoke fills the vale. The empty lap pool heightens the sense of geometric intrusion into a natural landscape. 4

These two paintings are exemplary of the artist’s awareness of his role as a historical actor. The Great Falls invokes mid-nineteenth-century sublimity fused with the nearly simultaneous impulse toward decorative sophistication that was to arrive soon a!er in the wake of Japonisme, Nabis prints, Art Nouveau, and the Vienna/Munich Jugendstil movement. A century later, Alex Katz and Neil Welliver would monumentalize this canny fusion of romantic landscape and decorative flatness into paintings that would rival in scale not only the panoramic vistas of Frederic Church, whose paintings of Niagara Falls are evidently on Alfred’s mind, but also the enveloping fields of Jackson Pollock (which Welliver so admired). Alfred is playing with memory and phenomenological eﬀect with The Great Falls, a painting that exists as both homage and contemporary measure. Fire Sky has its own antecedent in J.M.W. Turner, but it is clearly in the here and now of our unfolding climate crisis, which has been exacerbated by overdevelopment in the western United States. The graphically stylized stillness of both Fire Sky and the small Campfire Escape (2021) also invokes the pop surrealism of Roger Brown’s burning buildings, but the potentially timeless images of forest fires in Alfred’s 2021 paintings are loaded with contemporary relevance.

Brown begins with a world of his own making in mind: the same billows of smoke and cloud; the same buildings; the symbolic, symmetrical composition. Alfred begins with “the world,” in the more limitless sense of the observer confronting an exteriority. The uncanny is imbedded in Alfred’s imagery as a stillness that is related to Brown’s, but Alfred’s is more deadpan and it is crystalized by a type of realism in the photographic perspective in which architecture is in play. Scenes featuring the luminous red traﬃc cones in Test Site (2021) and the black portable queue pylons in Empty Airport (2021) seem caught in mid-pan, the frame frozen as the field of markers overlap each other in a spatial bunch and spread. And that brings up another analogous body of work, this time from photography: Thomas Demand’s photographs of rooms and furniture made from laminated paper. Demand’s mise-en-scènes are similarly depopulated, and his surfaces double as surrogates for the world, inhabiting the outlines of an otherwise quotidian realism but deriving their own uncanniness from their displacement of the real. Alfred deals in paint and can therefore display even more intricacy than Demand in his mapping of surfaces and spatial intervals, but a sense of displacement similarly a"ends his art. This apprehension of displacement doesn’t just undermine faith in the real; it has a more constructive aspect. It asserts that a picture is inherently a deconstructing construction, a material event in a material world. It isn’t just that a picture implies an absence, but that it also immediately fills that absence with its own material presence: not of the missing scene (a window framing a landscape is referring to some place other than where the painting resides), but of the painting itself. A binary there/not there is constantly toggling back and forth at the speed of perception, faster than thought, all the while illuminating reflections on style and the social moment. In this way, the picture plane of a painting is more of an arrival, something that comes into the room, than a departure, a window to an elsewhere. Alfred’s paintings bring the staged planes describing other spaces into the room we’re in with an obdurate materiality. I suppose all paintings do something similar, but few painters let us in on the secret. Alfred does just that, exchanging

sentimental a"achment to illusion for the wit of disclosure. All the surfaces of his paintings are readable in their location of sequence of application; you can follow the taped-oﬀ and cut edges and peer through the veils. Step back, and the image clicks together, then the planes start to move like rows of targets in a carnival shooting gallery.

Some of Alfred’s paintings let go of conventionally illusionistic spatiality altogether and instead embrace a rhythmic decorative simplicity where the sky’s color will be brought forward from a backdrop into a wallpaper flatness. In Meditation Field (2021) and Li!le Red Ridge (2021), the yellow and red skies, respectively, make an enfolding color statement that draws clouds and sun into the pa"ern. The foreground flowers in Meditation Field induce an animated motion through gracefully undulating stem lines, while the flying pair of ducks in silhoue"e, heading stage le!, establish a perpendicular gesture above the vertically reaching foreground tree line. The painter John Walker once said that landscape paintings o!en have some indication of a source of sound that provides both a sense of space and scale. Alfred’s paintings are more likely to have an implied gesture of movement: the wheeling pan described by Test Site and Empty Airport, or the linear undulations and angles of Meditation Field and Li!le Red Ridge. These conceits are space-giving, in an illusionistic sense, but they are also life-giving in that they suggest some animating agency in these otherwise abandoned scenes wherein the even flatness squeezes and locks out the unruly corporal figure(s). Alfred’s short animation LA Trance puts these suggestions of movement into real time. In fact, Test Site is a still. Accompanied by a lovely ambient track synched to the cuts, each scene in LA Trance is an abbreviated pan (sometimes vertical) of Los Angeles architecture: exteriors cu"ing into sky and reflected in pools, or interior spaces disclosing themselves. As in his paintings, the tension in these scenes arises from the absence of any apparent animal or human life, the exceptions being three shots of an overhead jet. The shelves in the aisle of one store interior are empty, but there doesn’t appear to have been any conflict or struggle. A scrupulously lamplit parking lot is bere!

Film Stills from LA Trance, Artwork By Brian Alfred, Photography & Motion by Benjamin Radatz, Music by Four Tet

of cars. Yet flora persists, as we see palm trees and the silhoue"es of roadside shrubs. Another hint of human presence, just out of sight, appears in the headlights emerging from a bend in a road that could be in Malibu and might be Mulholland Highway. That’s all we get; the expanding glow cuts to the next scene. People are nowhere to be seen as a tiny bubble of red and yellow light-halos wink on and oﬀ behind a distant out-building at the back edge of another more dimly lit parking lot. Given the persistent sense of pristine absence, we can imagine a near future shock, where self-driving cars and planes continue their appointed rounds while next-generation Roombas combat dust in building interiors. But Alfred is there, taking it down, exercising the painter’s audacious prerogative to leave stuﬀ out and present us with interpretive ambiguities that sustain our a"ention.

Stephen Westfall is an artist, writer and Professor of Visual Art at Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ.

Amazon, 2021 Acrylic on canvas 30 x 24 inches 76.2 x 61 cm

City Lights Sunset Sky, 2021

Acrylic on canvas 20 x 24 inches 50.8 x 61 cm

Coastal Escape, 2021

Acrylic on canvas 74 x 62 inches 188 x 157.5 cm

Empty Airport, 2021

Acrylic on canvas 50 x 60 inches 127 x 152.4 cm

Fire Sky, 2021 Acrylic on canvas 62 x 72 inches 157.5 x 182.9 cm

Meditation Field, 2021 Acrylic on canvas 50 x 60 inches 127 x 152.4 cm

Moderna, 2021 Acrylic on canvas 72 1⁄2 x 60 inches 184.2 x 152.4 cm

Pfizer, 2021

Acrylic on canvas 70 x 60 inches 177.8 x 152.4 cm

Red Ridge, 2021 Acrylic on canvas 70 x 80 inches 177.8 x 203.2 cm

Rodeo, 2021

Acrylic on canvas 50 x 60 inches 127 x 152.4 cm

Snowy View, 2021 Acrylic on canvas 40 x 30 inches 101.6 x 76.2 cm

Test Site, 2021 Acrylic on canvas 50 x 60 inches 127 x 152.4 cm

The Field Code, 2021 Acrylic on canvas 70 x 80 inches 177.8 x 203.2 cm

The Great Falls, 2021 Acrylic on canvas 72 x 180 inches 182.9 x 457.2 cm

The Park, 2021 Acrylic on canvas 24 x 20 inches 61 x 50.8 cm

Wheat & Sun, 2021 Acrylic on canvas 20 x 24 inches 50.8 x 61 cm

Land(e)scape, 2021 Acrylic on canvas 20 x 24 inches 50.8 x 61 cm

Li!le Red Ridge, 2021 Acrylic on canvas 20 x 16 inches 50.8 x 40.6 cm

Campfire Escape, 2021

Acrylic on canvas 14 x 11 inches 35.6 x 27.9 cm

Empty Oﬃce, 2021 Acrylic on canvas 14 x 11 inches 35.6 x 27.9 cm

Upstate, 2021

Acrylic on canvas 14 x 11 inches 35.6 x 27.9 cm

BRIAN ALFRED Born in Pi"sburgh, PA in 1974 Lives and works in Brooklyn, NY

2014 “New Animations,” Hezi Cohen Gallery, Tel Aviv, Israel “Beauty in Danger,” Salon 94 Video Wall, New York, NY 2013 “Storms and Stress,” Hezi Cohen Gallery, Tel Aviv, Israel

EDUCATION 1999 MFA, Yale University, New Haven, CT Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Madison, ME

2012 “It’s Already the End of the World,” Frist Center for Visual Art, Nashville, TN

1997 BFA, Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA

SOLO EXHIBITIONS

2010 “It’s Already the End of the World,” Haunch of Venison, New York, NY

2022 “Escape Plan,” Miles McEnery Gallery, New York, NY

2009 “Majic Window,” Studio La Ci"à, Verona, Italy

2019 “High Rises and Double Vision: Images of New York,” Miles McEnery Gallery, New York, NY

2008 “Millions Now Living Will Never Die!!!,” Haunch of Venison, Berlin, Germany

2018 “Future Shock,” Miles McEnery Gallery, New York, NY

2007 “Global Warning,” SCAI the Bathhouse, Tokyo, Japan

2017 “Techno Garden,” Maho Kubota Gallery, Tokyo, Japan

2006 “Surveillance,” Haunch of Venison, Zürich, Switzerland “Space is the Place!,” Mary Boone Gallery, New York, NY

2015 “It Takes A Million Years To Become Diamonds So Let’s Just Burn Like Coal Until The Sky Is Black,” Ameringer | McEnery | Yohe, New York, NY

2002 Max Protetch Gallery, New York, NY 2000 Max Protetch Gallery, New York, NY

GROUP EXHIBITIONS 2011 “Co-op,” Giraud Pissarro Ségalot, New York, NY “Rise Above,” Haunch of Venison, London, United Kingdom

2016 “In Praise of Shadows,” Ameringer | McEnery | Yohe, New York, NY

2003 “New Work,” Sandroni Rey Gallery, Los Angeles, CA

2005 “Paper and Pixels,” Mary Boone Gallery, New York, NY “Conspiracy?,” Haunch of Venison, London, United Kingdom 2004 “The Future is Now!,” Phoenix Art Museum, Phoenix, AZ “Overload,” Max Protetch Gallery, New York, NY “Fallout,” Samek Art Gallery, Bucknell University, Lewisburg, PA

2020 “Do You Think It Needs a Cloud?,” Miles McEnery Gallery, New York, NY 2019 “Fixed Contained,” Kotaro Nukaga Gallery, Tokyo, Japan “Alex Katz, Brian Alfred, Guy Yanai, Laurel Nakadate, Taro Komiya, Ryunosuke Yasui: Door Into Summer / M’s collection +,” Maho Kubota Gallery, Tokyo, Japan “Rag & Bone Mural,” Houston Street, New York, NY “Art on Link,” Art on LINK/NYC Kiosks, New York, NY 2018 “Belief in Giants,” Miles McEnery Gallery, New York, NY 2017 “The Frame,” Samsung Art TV, Samsung, USA “Like Oxygen,” Mountain Gallery, Brooklyn, NY 2016 “Room with a View,” EDDYSROOM, Brooklyn, NY “Art Film,” Art Basel Miami Beach, Miami, FL “Tokyo / London / New York,” Maho Kubota Gallery, Tokyo, Japan “Audacious: Contemporary Artists Speak Out,” Denver Art Museum, Denver, CO “Genbi Shinkansen,” Echigo Yuzawa, Niigata Prefecture, Japan “In an Illusion Village: Our Form Connected by Media Art,” Aomori Museum of Art, Aomori, Japan

“Extended Practice,” Palmer Museum of Art, Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA “Animated! Explorations into Moving Pictures,” Palmer Museum of Art, Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA 2015 “BLACK | WHITE” (curated by Brian Alfred), Ameringer | McEnery | Yohe, New York, NY “The Search For The Real” (curated by Brian Alfred), DeBuck Gallery, New York, NY “Villissima,” Hôtel Des Arts, Toulon, France “The Everywhere Exotic,” Culturadora, Art Miami New York, New York, NY 2014 “BLACK | WHITE” (curated by Brian Alfred), LaMontagne Gallery, Boston, MA “Art Film,” Art Basel Hong Kong, Hong Kong “100 Works for 100 Years: A Centennial Celebration,” Montclair Art Museum, Montclair, NJ “Mercury Retrograde: Animated Realities,” Williams Center Gallery, Lafaye"e College, Easton, PA “Film Cologne,” Art Cologne, Cologne, Germany 2013 “Uncanny Congruencies,” Palmer Museum of Art, Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA “Art Film,” Art Basel Miami Beach, Miami, FL “Mercury Retrograde: Animated Realities,” Stephen Stoyanov Gallery, New York, NY “Epic Fail,” Storefront Ten Eyck, Brooklyn, NY 2012 “exURBAN SCREENS,” Frankston Arts Centre/Cube 37, Melbourne, Australia 15th Japan Media Arts Festival, Tokyo, Japan “Sourced,” Steven Vail Fine Arts, Des Moines, IA 2011 “Beyond,” SCAI the Bathhouse, Tokyo, Japan

“Videosphere: A New Generation,” Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buﬀalo, NY “Animations,” The Big Screen Project, Big Screen Plaza, New York, NY “Printer’s Proof,” Bertrand Delacroix Gallery, New York, NY 2010 “12th International Cairo Biennale,” Cairo, Egypt “The Big Screen Project,” Big Screen Plaza, New York, NY “Me, Undoubtedly. 1309 Faces,” Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Wolfsburg, Germany “Aichi Triennale,” Aichi Prefectural Museum of Art, Nagoya, Japan “Surface Tension,” South Bend Museum of Art, South Bend, IN “onedotzero,” The Curtis R. Priem Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC) at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY “New Art For A New Century: Contemporary Acquisitions 2000 – 2010,” Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, CA

2009 “Mercury Retrograde: Animated Realities,” Big Medium Gallery, Austin, TX “The Figure and Dr. Freud,” Haunch of Venison, New York, NY 2008 “Uncoordinated: Mapping Cartography in Contemporary Art,” Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati, OH “Ru Ru Ru Landscape: How I see the World Around Me,” Shizuoka Prefectural Museum of Art, Shizuoka, Japan “Teaching An Old Dog New Tricks,” Den Frie Udstilling, Copenhagen, Denmark 2007 “The Shapes of Space,” Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY “System Error: War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning,” Palazzo delle Papesse, Siena, Italy “Art Fair Tokyo,” Tokyo, Japan “Art Film,” Art Basel, Basel, Switzerland

2006 “The 59th Minute, Times Square Panasonic Astrovision Screen,” Creative Time, New York, NY “American Academy of Arts and Le"ers Invitational Exhibition,” American Academy of Arts and Le"ers, New York, NY “Radar: Selections from the Kent and Vicki Logan Collection,” Denver Art Museum, Denver, CO “New Code,” Studio La Ci"à, Verona, Italy “Signal Channel: Contemporary Video Art,” Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Omaha, NE 2005 “Produced at Eyebeam,” Eyebeam, New York, NY “Surface,” Lucas Schoormans Gallery, New York, NY “ART!+*><WORK,” Ignivomous, New York, NY 2004 “Metropolis,” National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia “Art and Architecture 1900 – 2000,” Palazzo Ducale, Genoa, Italy “Inaugural Show,” Sandroni Rey Gallery, Los Angeles, CA “Trouble in Paradise,” Van Brunt Gallery, New York, NY “Happy Ending,” Kingfisher Projects, Queens, NY 2003 “Toxic,” Max Protetch Gallery, New York, NY “Digital Showcase,” Austin Museum of Digital Art, Austin, TX 1999 “Group Show,” Max Protetch Gallery, New York, NY “MFA Thesis Exhibition,” Yale School of Art Gallery, New Haven, CT

SOUND & VISION PODCAST Brian Alfred is the host of the podcast of conversations with contemporary artists about the creative process. Selected artists include Danny Ferrell, Chloe Wise, Ryan McGinness, Tom Sachs, Svenja Deininger, Fred Tomaselli, Sarah Cain, Inka Essenhigh, Sean Landers, Bo Bartle", Daniel Heidkamp, Shara Hughes, amongst others.

AWARDS 2018 College of Art & Architecture Faculty Research Grant, Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA

1997 Edwin W. Zoller Scholarship, Penn State School of Visual Arts, University Park, PA

SELECT COLLECTIONS 2016 College of Art & Architecture Faculty Research Grant, Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA

Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buﬀalo, NY Cleveland Clinic Art Program, Lyndhurst, OH

2015 Institute for the Arts and Humanities Individual Faculty Grant, Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA Jerome Foundation Grant, St. Paul, MN

Denver Art Museum, Denver, CO Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, NY

2013 Carriage House Arts Residency, Islip, NY Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, New York, NY

Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Houston, TX

2011 Excellence Award, Japan Media Arts Festival, Tokyo, Japan

National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia

Montclair Art Museum, Montclair, NJ

New Britain Museum of American Art, New Britain, CT 2008 Pennsylvania State University Alumni Award, University Park, PA

Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, CA

Phoenix Museum of Art, Phoenix, AZ 2006 Joan Mitchell Foundation Award, New York, NY American Academy of Arts and Le"ers Purchase Award, New York, NY San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA Pennsylvania State University Alumni Award, University Park, PA Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY 2005 University Museum of Contemporary Art, University of Massachuse"s New York Foundation of the Arts Inspiration Award, New York, NY at Amherst, Amherst, MA 2003 Wellmark Blue Cross Blue Shield Corporate Art Collection, Des Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, New York, NY Moines, IA 1999 Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY Phelps Berdan Memorial Award, Yale University, New Haven, CT Skowhegan Match Scholarship, Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Madison, ME

Published on the occasion of the exhibition

BRIAN!ALFRED ESCAPE!PLAN

17 March – 23 April 2022 Miles McEnery Gallery 511 West 22nd Street New York NY 10011 tel +1 212 445 0051 www.milesmcenery.com Publication © 2022 Miles McEnery Gallery All rights reserved Essay © 2021 Stephen Westfall

Director of Publications Anastasija Jevtovic, New York, NY Photography by Christopher Burke Studio, New York, NY Color separations by Echelon, Santa Monica, CA Catalogue designed by McCall Associates, New York, NY ISBN: 978-1-949327-70-0 Cover: Red Ridge, (detail), 2021