Forbidden Colours by Brian Bixby
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About this series
Forbidden Colours is a photographic series of abstract landscapes created by multidisciplinary artist Brian Bixby with a variety of household materials such as gelatin, shampoo, glitter, and acrylic paint. In this series of medium-format analog photographs, the still life is reinterpreted in an abstract fashion. The ephemeral materials melt quickly under the heat of the lights, so Brian Bixby must capture each image before it disappears.
Interview
To start, can you talk a bit about your background as photographer and artist?
I remember capturing my first images using a video camera that my father owned. Once I realized I could make pictures of the world around me and play them back, I became hooked. Growing up and throughout my teens, I directed numerous short films and music videos. I love moving images' ability to develop characters and tell stories. I had access to a photo development lab in high school, where I learned how to process and develop film. There is something magical about working under the red lights of a darkroom and freezing time with a single photographic image. I never lost my passion for storytelling, but once I got more serious about photography and developing film, I became decidedly more interested in the power of still images.
While I was learning about photo development, I discovered Adobe Photoshop. This software was another breakthrough for me as a photo editing tool and an alternative to working with physical media. I would spend hundreds of hours working on digital abstract pieces on my computer. In my early 20s, I received an invitation to exhibit some of my abstract works in a large exhibition of digital art. The show was a success, and over the following years, I had other opportunities to exhibit my work throughout the United States and overseas. I didn't see much digital art at home in New Mexico, so I began curating exhibitions. Over the following years, I had the opportunity to curate at some of the best spaces in the state, such as the Santa Fe Art Institute. Despite the public's resistance to digital media, the exhibitions received positive reviews.
In the early 2010s, I moved to Berlin to set up a studio and to be closer to the contemporary art and music scene. My artwork and photographs appeared on several German-based music releases and music videos, so I had a network of friends in the city before I arrived. While living in Berlin, I kept busy creating new work and exhibited some of my installations and photographic works in several historic art spaces around the city, such as the KW Institute for Contemporary Art. I love collaboration, and living in Berlin gave me many opportunities to meet with other creatives and work on projects together. After a couple of years in Berlin, I applied to study Media Art and Design at the Bauhaus. I was over the moon with excitement when I was accepted! Rather than commuting every week, I decided to move to Weimar. Over the following years, I developed numerous photography and interactive installation projects during my studies. In 2021 I completed my master's degree, and my thesis became the first NFT artwork published at the Bauhaus.
Can you talk about what brought you into the world of NFTs?
For most of my professional life, gallerists, curators, and museum directors have told me that "digital art isn't art," "we don't exhibit digital art," or "I like your work, but we don't know how to sell something digital." I never really liked the term digital artist; we don't call painters acrylic artists. Still, I suppose the art market needed a way to differentiate between works created with human hands from those produced using digital tools. I obviously disagreed with these "art professionals" opinions, but was also aware that photography had taken about 50 years to find acceptance as a legitimate art form.
So, the first time I read about what a non-fungible token was, I just about jumped out of my seat with joy! I didn't need any convincing or leap of imagination because it made perfect sense to me and solved the fundamental "problem" with digital art: ownership and provenance. This technology was the moment I had been waiting for since I had created art with my computer and thought to myself, "how can I save this... forever?" I love the glow of pixels and often display my photographs in light boxes to replicate the luminescence of a computer monitor. If my intention is for the image to glow, then the NFT is the perfect vessel for this artwork to exist compared to paper which has traditionally been the way fine art photography is displayed and sold. Of course, I still love prints on paper and developing analog film in the darkroom, but those mediums feel more like in-between points for me now, and the NFT is the original.
Can you tell more about the series Forbidden Colours and the reference you made to Laszlo Moholy-Nagy?
My series' Forbidden Colours' was developed during an experimental painting course I was attending at University. I began just like the rest of the students, working with acrylics and oils, but I wasn't achieving the type of look I was seeking. Then, I remember thinking about something László Moholy-Nagy had written about: art making the invisible visible. I was struck by the idea of painting with ephemeral household materials like shampoo, cleaning supplies, food coloring, gelatin, etc. Perhaps it was a bit of a leap from the original intention of Moholy-Nagy's comment. Still, I thought it could be interesting to freeze these ephemeral materials in a state of flux and capture something that nobody had seen before. The use of various glass lenses on a medium format camera further distorted and flattened the materials allowing me to visualize them in a way that is different from the naked human eye.
Moholy-Nagy is one of my favorite artists, and he had taught in the same building we were studying in, so it felt fitting to look to the past for guidance and inspiration on this project. The title of this series was my tribute and interpretation of Maholy-Nagy's "Neues Sehen" (New Vision), a term he coined based on his belief that the camera could create an entirely new way of seeing the outside world that the human eye could not. My twist on his terminology was "forbidden colours" – wherein the camera can reveal something that has been hidden from the human eye.
The photographs look like vast landscapes, but in fact they are shot in a studio. They look otherworldly, abstract and yet familiar. What where your thoughts while creating them?
Typically, as artists, we need to use acid-free materials, pigmented inks, and things like that to ensure our work's longevity. For this project, it was fun and liberating to abandon those limitations and to allow myself to work with anything I wanted, including ephemeral everyday items you might not consider art material. I began mixing up these ingredients in my kitchen, and then I would assemble them onto a stretched canvas. Most of the compositions would take about half an hour to an hour to compose, and then I would take a single image using an analog camera. The use of analog equipment created another limitation and added an element of chance to the work because I only had one shot at getting it right, and I wouldn't know until days later if I had successfully captured the image or not.
After shooting a single roll of film, I knew I was onto something, and I kept repeating this routine for several weeks until I had captured 20 individual images that I was satisfied with. The structures reminded me of aerial photographs of vast alien landscapes and crystalline structures. In some photos, I would begin to see something vaguely familiar forming, such as a shark fin or a sandy beach, and then I would try to capture what I saw onto film. But what I like about working in such an abstract way is that it's not up to me to completely define the subject or what it's supposed to be. So it's always interesting when someone sees a symbol, face, or something I never initially intended.
Digger Barnes released in 2014 the song Way of the Rover. The song also encourages to close your eyes and to listen to the silence. Every time I do that I see your abstract landscapes in front of my eyes. Which song do you currently listen and when you close your eyes which photography gets in front of your eyes?
Wow, thanks, that's a huge compliment! I think many artists, especially abstract artists, are seeking to transport viewers into a kind of trance or to create another state of mind with their work, so if you can still see these images in your mind's eye, I feel the artwork is a success. You and I have never spoken about this series until this interview, so I also think it's cool that you found a connection between music and these images. Music has greatly influenced me and is one of my favorite art forms, so I like to imagine that music flows into my work and enriches everything I do.
Lately, I have been listening to the noise artist Fennesz; he has a track titled 'Endless Summer,' that transports me into a nostalgic and surreal state of mind. If I close my eyes while listening to this track, I can visualize several photographs from Gregory Crewdson's cinematic 'Dream House' series. There is a quiet strangeness to these photographs of American neighborhoods that vaguely remind me of my childhood experiences growing up in New Mexico. Walking around the neighborhood after dark, encountering a motorcycle accident, sightings of meteors crashing in the desert, and the otherworldly buzzing and droning of the electrical power lines as the wind caused them to vibrate. Crewdson's work and the beautifully intricate noise of Fennesz conjure up these nostalgic and haunting memories.
As you’re now back in the United States, what did you take with you in terms of seeing/making art while you were attending and teaching at the Bauhaus school in Germany?
As a fan of the Bauhaus, it was incredibly inspirational to live and work in some of the same spaces as the founders, artists, and designers I admire. I was also introduced to the work of many artists I had never heard of before. Weimar is a city filled with history and intrigue, especially for an outsider such as myself, who sees everything with eyes wide open because it's so different from the environment where I grew up.
I was living in the heart of the Bauhaus within months of moving to Weimar. My address was Bauhausstraße 1 (Bauhaus Street #1), and I could look out of my apartment window into the original studio of Henry van de Velde, the architect that designed the building before it became the Bauhaus in 1919. Living amongst the ghosts of the past and these monumental architectural relics had a profound effect on me, gave me a unique perspective, and encouraged me to dive even deeper into the history of the Bauhaus. As a result, I created numerous artworks referencing the Bauhaus and curated several events and exhibitions in honor of the 100th anniversary of the Bauhaus in 2019.
The Bauhaus method of documentation, observation, and experimentation hasn't changed much in the past 100 years. One of the first instructors at the Bauhaus, Johannes Itten, exemplified these concepts in his preliminary course. Itten would walk with students through the city or the surrounding forest, encouraging them to record their experiences as sketches or to take notes based on rhythmic patterns one might find in the irregularity of the cobblestone pathways. These observational notes and nature studies became the basis of more complex works using other mediums and art forms. This process-based approach encourages the mastery of multiple mediums and has become a part of my own working process when developing new projects. I think I learned almost as much about photography in the architecture department as I did in the photography courses because there was a lot of collaboration and conversations between the different faculties. I found this openness and fluidity refreshing and super inspirational. The idea of a singular practice never appealed to me, so I felt right at home in this environment where interdisciplinary mixed media and experimentation were encouraged.
Where is your photography going?
In the past couple of years, I have been working with life-size photography, so if a person I'm photographing is 6 feet tall in real life, they are also 6 feet tall in the photographic print. I've been experimenting with combining these large photographs with lightboxes and LCD screens. Eventually, I would like to remove my photographs' content from the picture frame and create large-scale environments in physical spaces. I am also working on solutions to embed my photography-based installations into NFTs. The integration of NFTs and physical hardware has enabled new opportunities to display and exhibit my installations in public spaces and the homes of private collectors around the world without the need for shipping physical materials. Having said that, I am always going back to the basics and simply shooting with an analog or digital camera because that is where my ideas often begin. I enjoy complexity in my work, but sometimes the best ideas arrive when I keep it simple and just point and shoot.
Artist Bio
Brian Bixby is an artist, curator and co-founder of Bauhaus NEXT100, a non-profit arts organization. Bixby's mixed media work and hybrid installations often explore new methods of production and collaboration. Bixby's work has been shown internationally at venues such as KW Institute for Contemporary Art Berlin, Bauhaus University, Austin Museum of Digital Art, Centre of Contemporary Art Znaki Czasu Poland, and Art Basel Miami.
Photographer: Brian Bixby
Twitter: @brian_bixby
Instagram: @brian_bixby
Open Sea: Forbidden Colours
Photos copyright Brian Bixby
DRAWLIGHTS | 1/1 – one post/one photographer, weekly. Off-chain and on-chain. By Peter Nitsch, lens-based artist, a member of Jenny Metaverse and lifetime Member of the Royal Photographic Society of Thailand.