Josh Brand

Born 1980 in Elkhorn, Wisconsin
Lives and Works in Brooklyn, New York

Josh Brand creates unique photographic objects, or photograms, through an open-ended process of darkroom experimentation. Brand exposes photographic paper to light filtered through semitransparent materials, including sheets of punctured plastic or strips of cardboard. The result, visible in works such as Vertical Red White Light, is an abstract interplay of color, shape, depth, and surface. Other works contain fragments of representational imagery culled from photographs of objects, places, and people in Brand's daily life. Brand's images reflect his commitment to photography as a way of perceiving and signifying the everyday alongside the ethereal. His approach allows for continuous improvisation and dialogue between works because, according to the artist, the "fragment of one picture is the starting point for another". Though all of his images are singular objects, by arranging multiple works in progressively larger groups, Brand introduces the possibility of seeing each picture as part of a sequence of images that interweave the processes of perception and memory, continuity and change.