Bill Brand

"In Bill Brand's work the body is resurgent. It is simultaneously striated canvas, sovereign location of the self, cipher and sign of history, family, and economics, and central possible field of resurrection. ... Film, that invisible chain of light and of coded digits, carries a kind of metaphysics of the body here. Bill's movies insist that the body is perception, and is film's perceptive frame. In present time, the body sits as location of trauma, art, and the cynical politics of government and big business."
- Robert Seydel, "Bill Brand in the Middle: Or, A Pickle of My Own"

For over four decades Bill Brand has been a pioneering artist, educator, activist and film preservationist. His experimental and documentary films, videos and installations continually redefine the cinematic frame. They push the boundaries of perception to literally change how we see. The films range widely in form and subject from monuments of minimalist purity to experiments in post-modern excess.

When Bill Brand's films first came into public view in the 1970's, they were known for their formal and conceptual stringency and were associated with Minimal Art and Structural Film. Later his films went from being visually reductive to massively complex, taking on elements of social content and personal expression. Yet, throughout, he explored a widening field of systems -- including the social, biological and psychological system of the body as subject; and more recently the gestural expression of both the camera and the performing subject.


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