“Words, words, words! They shut one off from the universe. Three quarters of the time one’s never in contact with things, only with the beastly words that stand for them.”
– Aldous Huxley

Bradly Brown’s work explores the fundamental flaw of language as an expression of our deepest selves, and the contradictions of language as image. Pained, repetitive words and phrases are subdued and channeled into new forms, given life as watery zebras, muscular tigers, an anthropomorphized WWII fighter plane, and breathless track runners.

Brown first creates film negatives from mysterious scrawlings recovered from a university library trash can — the aching and robotic exercises of an unknown author. Brown’s subsequent use of older photographic techniques to recontextualize the images, through Cyanotype and Van Dyke processes, naturally limits his palette to a calming range of organic browns and blues, fading or deepening depending on exposure to light. He imposes a more natural and visceral world on the underlying fumbling language, as well as foiling the hyper-Photoshopped slickness of our mass-media world.

Brown casts himself as the collector and translator of the rambling writings of a possible obsessive-compulsive or schizophrenic author. Seemingly overwhelmed by life, the writer relies on repeating sad and often sinister words and phrases — emptying them of their meaning. The words become separated from their function as communication and instead point to a universally felt instability and insecurity. Aldous Huxley condemned words as a barrier to direct experience–words become the surrogates for the things themselves — and this is how communication works, whether we like it or not.

Yet Brown’s vigorous, heaving creatures slip between worlds and words; they dematerialize before our eyes into the white of the paper, then flip over, reversing the positive and negative spaces. Meaningless words are re-formed into the experiences of predator and prey, aggression and escape, speed and survival — the primal building blocks of life that transcend any symbols or language.