LA><ART

For LA><ART Brendan Fowler will present a series of new works created with a commercial industrial embroidery machine that continues Fowler’s long running engagement with photography. These works are a way to process and present personal narratives in autobiographical photographs that are then translated to sculptural objects and wall works. In Fowler’s photographic and sculptural practice, many of the procedures are similar: everyday images are captured with a camera and then subjected to various types of computer software to resize, shape and tweak the image as you would a 3-D object. Rather than a finished product emerging from an inkjet printer, the new embroidered works exist between photography, painting and sculpture. As textured impressions, Fowler treats these arrangements, made with new and old technology, as collaborative gestures that weave together a host of industrial processes. The result is threaded compositions that occasionally include the machine’s errors in layered topographies resembling a relief map. 

 

The embroidery machine is the modern, industrialized grandchild of folk craft technique translated into practical application and then updated to serve consumer needs. By using the same machines that stitch the emblems of labor unions, sports team logos and corporate insignia onto our clothing, Fowler intervenes in an immediately recognizable method of production. He does so in order to repurpose industrial appliances for his own unique weavings. New Camera is, in a larger sense, an exhibition about the sensate world of global manufacturing that hastily adds texture and distinction to our personal effects, clothes and wares—one robotic embroidery at a time.

 

Brendan Fowler works in a variety of media to express personal narratives, from pop music performance to sculpture to photography. Since 2007, his output has been mostly dedicated to sculpture and installation, exhibiting in galleries and museums internationally, among them Rivington Arms (New York), Untitled (New York), The New Museum (New York), The Museum of Modern Art (New York), The Aspen Museum (Aspen, CO), A Palazzo (Brescia, Italy), and Gallerie Thadeus Ropac (Paris). New Camera at LA><ART will be his first solo show in Los Angeles.

 

LA><ART’s programs are produced with generous support from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts; The Anthony & Jeanne Pritzker Family Foundation; California Community Foundation; The City of Los Angeles’ Department of Cultural Affairs; Étant donnés, the French- American Fund for Contemporary Art; Foundation for Contemporary Arts; The Los Angeles County Arts Commission; Nathan Cummings Foundation, with the support and encouragement of Roberta Friedman Cummings, Dashiell Driscoll and Clea Shearer; The National Endowment for the Arts; The Pasadena Art Alliance; and The Philip and Muriel Berman Foundation.