Creative Work:

The paradigmatic-shift of the so-called, Second Renaissance, is sentient. The era of the orthodox career-artist is quickly drawing to a close, as closeted, behemoth cultural institutions appear increasingly implausible and incestuous. For many creative people, the art-object has become an ingredient or inceptive aspect of a larger, open, often mediated, concern. No longer the exclusive privileged domain of the traditional alliance of dealer-academic-museum (the curatorial class), art now regularly escapes these constraints. The archaic practice of art-object-making serves personal philosophical and nascent purposes; for myself, it`s an intriguing balance of obsession, critical reflection, precision and impulsiveness. The physicality of some of my art is a gratifying counterpoint to my media-oriented and technological projects -- stirring of electrons. Predictably, the critical, avant-garde dialogue that informed my early creative work has become fractured and depreciated. Insightful intelligence is now less likely to be dependent on hierarchical scholasticism. This dethronement of learning can be understood as the most exciting intellectual frontier we are now crossing. The relevant artist today is multi-dimensional-- an intradisciplinary generalist, with an expansive set of skills.

1972-12 Participation in numerous solo/group exhibitions, primarily in artist-run and public galleries; non-traditional spaces and networker-culture; always a variety of photographic/publishing projects underway! My first one-man exhibition entitled Exposure in 1973 consisted of ocean-shore-battered and phenyl-blue-dyed etching-papers with plenty of photographic documentation!

1979-86 The MetaConstruct: Thirteen Interdependent Installations across Canada (a theoretical demonstration with situationist-overtones, consisting of multiple series of painted-constructed-irregular-evolving components; housed in corked-lined, shellacked-plywood boxes; still modified but rarely exhibited now; stacked in Public Storage lockers) textual descriptions disseminated electronically; anticipated hypercard stack of two-thousand photographic details from the installations. One component, the Sticks, (eight-foot lengths of whittled then painted pine) were left in a great bundle outside my Seattle hotel in 1989. One-by-one they disappeared. I've recreated a few more since. Another component is the Burnt Numerals; a consumption of ordering systems. Also, the repainted-paintings (layered varathane w/ stencils): High-Gloss-Quarters

1980-12 Series of self-published ISBN Bookworks: (full-page bleed photos/weboffset on newsprint/128-1024 pages each/perfect-bound; gradual and extensive accumulation and sequencing of photographic imagery), still exhibited and distributed world-wide. Subsequent titles are currently published electronically on the WWW/Internet; the project is entitled, The 12hr-ISBN-JPEG Project: every 12 hours another photographic, hypermodern image is posted from an ongoing sequence.

1981-89-99-12 Millennium Project: Illustrations for an Essay (refracted Crystal Palace/collapsed, hollowed-out and redrawn cartoon imagery; several hundred, various red-inks on tracing-layout-paper drawings/collages, repeatedly overprinted with 83 small photo-linocuts in white, waterbase lino-ink; possible studies for very large frescoes); in-progress.

1989 World Persona (VDT Calligraphic Laserscript) type design to accompany a comprehensive collection of visages. To be incorporated in the core.dump project.

1987 Nexus Press Residency/Project, Atlanta, Georgia (four large offset posters and mailer; distributed freely) still available. Animated Suspension; Four Red Duotones in a Discontinuous Symbolic Order: (1) All is not forgiven, (2) Escape or revenge, (3) Sculpture: The three smallest bones, (4) Douzaine Suzanne: Guilty in your eyes.

1982-85 Tex-Park, Vernal 646, Ezekiel, Amazing Grace, Aura (audio-installations: Halifax, Toronto, Peterborough, Calgary, Buffalo, New York City, et al. Radio broadcasts.)

1977 Babies, Cakes, Dogs (over the course of a year, personally retrieved over 200,000 discarded snapshots from a Toronto photofinishing laboratory) source of exhibitions, magazine-publications, videos and articles.

1974-76-82-95-09 Video Productions/Installations/Cable Programming/Exhibitions: Canada, USA, Europe; infrequent; current interest in sub-miniature video-cameras, desktop-video, independent broadcasts and surveillance (the 7-11 station), slow-scan ham transmissions.

1982 International Detective Training School Diploma. And some transparencies.

1979-83 celluloid films: Arrival (color, silent, 55 minutes, 16mm film which features the progressive malfunction of the camera while echoing the subject matter of Lumiere`s first film); X00X (color, silent, 72 minutes, 16mm film consisting of a year`s restructured documentation of the firing of the noon-day gun in Halifax); various low-budget screenings: (Bell Auditorium, Argyle House, Halifax, The Funnel, Toronto,National Film Board Theatres). Digital miniature versions of films!

2006-11 Banzai and other digital films (mp4s)

2000-12 bbs: brad brace sound: bbs: continuous online streamed audio field recordings.

2003-12 Global Islands Project: ongoing series of multi-media pdf-books -- a pastoral, pictorial and phonic elicitation of island parameters...

2008-11 Pleated Plaid Pamphlets, Fight History, and other e-publications (pdfs)

2008-12 PROXY Gallery founded/curated online (zencart) storefront-gallery specializing in social-media self-portraits.


bbrace@eskimo.combbrace2.html