Animalcules

August 5, 2011 – September 17, 2011

Click here to see images from the opening.

Brian James Priest’s exhibit Animalcules centers on human beings as both collectors and collections, the exhibit will feature large-scale prints, sound and floor installations, and live performance art.

Priest’s exhibition takes its name from Anton van Leeuwenhoek, inventor of the microscope and discoverer of microorganisms. Leeuwenhoek looked at an ordinary drop of pond water and discovered the beauty and monstrous face of the microscopic world. He “found Eden in every drop of water”, so the world instantly became more dense, more wonderful, and more terrifying.

“We are a collection of experience as well as ecology. I am both marveled and frightened by the reality of being mostly bacteria cells (9 to 1 actually),” says Priest. “Essentially, by harboring 4 billion organisms we are each walking planets. This implies the possibilities of agendas unbeknownst to our scale of day to day survival.”

His piece Body Zoo is a tiny zoological garden of these organisms contained within a sub dermal silicon structure implant in his arm, is inspired by this.

Priest seeks to draw connections between our very distant pasts and our distant futures. “We have but only a short tenure of these molecules,” says Priest. “We eventually offer them back to the universe.”

Sand is the dominant material within this show. With Grains, he makes contoured forms of individually collected grains of sand. Within that established border he invents bizarre landscapes for the surface. “These grains were collected by me over the last 6 months,” says Priest.

Wind and Life works with one single grain of sand from the Bodele depression near Lake Chad in Africa, one of the world’s driest spaces. By the combined effort of dust storms and the Bodele low level jet stream this specific region of the world, that contains little life, produces more than half the dust needed for fertilizing the Amazon rainforest. “While these grains act as transports of life, I use that as a way to discuss them as transports of imagination,” says Priest. “Little single units of inspiration of form.”

In all, Priest’s work asks for different levels of belief. “Artists tell stories; we convince you that a chunk of material is something else, that it stands for something else, that it represents something bigger and more profound. I want people to question everything, not just my creations, but the world around them.”

Brian James Priest received his BFA from Herron School of Art and Design in 2004 and his MFA from Washington University in St. Louis in 2007. He is currently a visiting lecturer at California Polytechnic State University where he instructs sculpture, intermedia, and art theory. Other professional activities have included operating the Biscuits and Gravy Gallery and working in various set design and fabrication shops. He has recently had exhibitions at Midwest Museum of Art, Kemper Museum of Art, and White Flag Project Space and is a 2008 Efroymson Fellow.

This exhibition is sponsored by:
The Efroymson Family Fund, Hotbed Creative, the Christel DeHaan Family Foundation, Murphy Art Center L.L.C., and The Allen Whitehill Clowes Charitable Foundation.

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Posted on: 06.07.2011