Brandon Anschultz: Transmission/Destination

BRANDON ANSCHULTZ, "DARK, NO SHIP"

Photos courtesy of Brandon Anschultz

Several weeks ago, as he was prepping for Transmission/Destination, his solo show at COCA’s Millstone Gallery (which opens October 10), Brandon Anschultz was kind enough to let us pop by his studio, located on one of the upper floors of the Department of Health building in Grand Center. The curator for that show, Shannon Fitzgerald, was also there; the conversation ranged from Star Wars to sanding belts (Anschultz, also a skilled carpenter, apportions part of his studio to woodworking). Though you can “get” his large, bright, abstract canvases without knowing the theories behind the images (this show was inspired by a diagram in Claude Shannon’s 1948 text, The Mathematical Theory of Communication), knowing how the show works makes viewing it a richer experience. —Stefene Russell

STLMAG: I know the show’s very conceptual—it’s based on mathematics, right?

BA: That’s part of the framework …

FS: Maybe we could start from the title and work back from there—the ideas, and how specific pieces fill out the conceptual framework.

STLMAG: Brandon, by the way, what’s your background?

BA: I did the first part of my education, my undergraduate, in an architecture program. So I took all of my design, color and drawing classes within an architectural framework. And then a couple of years into that, switched into fine arts. I came to Wash. U. in 2000, and did my MFA with a concentration on printmaking and drawing, but also did quite a bit of installation work.

STLMAG: And you’ve show quite a bit since then.

BA: Yeah, I’ve shown pretty consistently since 2003.

SF: It started with group shows—I first saw his work, and it was a standout, at a small group show at Fort Gondo. He’s had two solo shows, one at Saint Louis University, and one at Philip Slein.

STLMAG: So this is your third solo show—it’s quite a bit bigger?

BA: I don’t know if it’s any larger, but it’s more focused. It’s the most focused show I’ve done so far.

SF: But I think the shows have built upon each other. Brandon is in the studio regularly, and if he doesn’t have a show driving the production of his work, he’s still exploring—there are many failures and many successes, but they build upon each other, so each show has been a little different. Something else has always been added. Or there’s another idea he’s exploring.

BA: Or they’re pared down and focused. I think that’s what’s happened this year—everything’s come into a bit of a focus. The mathematics, that’s what you read about in my artist’s statement—there was a chart I saw in a book, and that sort of helped me focus, like the conceptual framework of my process of thinking about making work. It’s not necessarily about mathematics or about the system, but the system is a description of how my thought process works.

SF: It provides a structure, or parameters, for working that you follow, but I think you break those parameters, too.

BA: Oh, totally (raucous laughter). This one’s called “Dark, No Ship” (Note: pictured above) and it was a painting that I made a little less than a year ago. It’s pretty much completely from my imagination. It’s not “of” anything specific that I’ve drawn or built—it’s after part of a science fiction book. There’s obviously a relationship between visually to imagery from Star Wars and stuff like that. But it’s not necessarily that. Does that make sense?

SF: It does. It’s abstract, not a literal representation of anything, but when you’re looking at it conjures Galactica, and floating Death Star, planets …

BA: Totally. For a while, I thought the title was “This is Not The Death Star” (Laughs).

SF: Now, this is acrylic and wash on canvas?

BA: Yeah, it’s one of my first paintings on canvas, because I’ve been working on panels for several years, and then switched back to canvas. But they’re very thick applications of gouache and acrylic. They’re very physical marks, this is not an illusionistic painting. And it’s a very muted color palette for me. This was the start of the work that’s in the show.

SF: The title of the exhibition is Transmission/Destination, and I think that’s key to what he’s doing. Transmission is the movement of a thought, the movement of an object, an idea, information and how that it is delivered; and destination is when it’s ultimately received. That’s one way of thinking about it, anyway. So it’s all about communication.

BA: Definitely. And that goes back to the chart, which is basically just a system of A to B to Z.

SF: And in a more literal way, the transmission relates to the kind of object-making, from painting to drawing to sculpture, and then back again.

BA: And we can go pretty chronologically with these. From this starting point, the painting, I made a little sculpture of it, a really quick sculpture. That’s against my natural inclinations, to make things quickly and haphazardly. So from painting to sculpture, the two definitely share qualities, but are totally different. And then from the sculpture, I started doing drawings, literally, of the sculpture. In my mind, these are the same things.

SF: It’s a nice jump from a more formal way of working, the labor-intensive, tedious approach that’s all about the formal issues of form, line, color and tension, versus this wacky, haphazard experience.

STLMAG: So what’s this little guy (pictured at left) made out of?

BA: (Laughs). It’s made out of all kinds of weird stuff, a chunk of foam, some pieces of acrylic, a few pieces of wood, some nails …

SF: It’s crude, and the materials are found and repurposed, but it’s still refined … the two pieces still talk to each other.

STLMAG: It almost reminds me of those African fetishes, where you drive the nail in when someone gets sick, to drive the sickness into the statue.

BA: The way it’s going to be displayed gets to the heart of that—and in a way, it is the same thing, after working in a really rigorous manner, it’s really awesome to sortof … let loose with an idea really quickly.

SF: And it talks about power, and movement—the power to implode, explode.

BA: But it just takes off from there. These drawings of this become their own thing. And then I made another sculpture, but from the drawing of the painting. So it starts a cycle, a loop. So I redraw the sculpture with some elements of that sculpture. And it becomes a painting like that (points to a work in progress, in much brighter colors than “Dark, No Ship”) so it becomes like a big circuit, where it comes back to itself, but it’s been transformed.

STLMAG: It’s interesting that it started out with such somber colors and seems to be getting brighter and brighter …

BA: That wasn’t intentional. That was just the way it developed.

SF: And you can see an energy line here …

STLMAG: So Shannon—how did you come to take on the curatorial role here?

SF: Millstone approached me. They have a relatively new gallery director, Belinda Lee, who is an artist as well. And she’s introducing a strong program that balances national and local. She invited me to curate a show, and I’ve been following Brandon’s work almost since his graduation—or maybe a little after. We’ve done studio visits for years and were always talking, so to me it was our opportunity for the two of us to work together. He’s at a great juncture right now. The most rewarding part is working with an artist when they are making a shift. It’s exciting, it’s a little risky, he’s introducing something he’s never done before, and that’s kind of a fragile, energetic place. And Millstone is a multipurpose institution; it’s not just a visual arts institution … it’s interesting to have different groups coming through to see it.

STLMAG: So, there’s some smaller pieces down here … do you want to talk about those?

BA: We’ve been talking about one idea as a circuit, but there are several circuits going on. This is a different circuit right here—this is based on that first sculpture, that sort of robot transmitter … another circuit that’s going to be in the show is this big painting I’m working on—I was thinking about binary systems, about stars or atoms, binary properties working together that hold each other in place. That big painting is the largest I’ve ever made—6 by 8 feet. I’ve done murals that are bigger, but that’s the biggest stand-alone painting I’ve ever done. 

STLMAG: Shannon was talking about “energy lines” earlier—these florescent orange or yellow lines in your work …

BA: I love those shots of color, that’s a device I’ve used in my work for a long time, pretty much since graduate school. It’s this charged color contrast, in color theory they call it simultaneous contrast, where two colors that are at odds with each other are so close that they have a relationship, but they’re far enough away in terms of color, they bounce and sort of hurt your eyes to look at them.

SF: I think it’s where the tension happens in his work. There’s punctuations of that color and intensity—and binary systems are all about oppositions.

BA: Within the individual works themselves, I want there to be something that’s a little uncomfortable or difficult, or not quite quote-unquote pretty.

SF: And then there’s the curiosity factor.

STLMAG: It’s interesting, too, how science plays a role here but it’s not science science—like the pleasure of looking at all the arcane tools that engineers use, those gadgets and weird measuring instruments, which are beautiful in their own right … even the colors remind me of scientific manuals and instruments, the bright orange with the blue and the khaki.

BA: (Laughs). Khaki is one of my favorite color titles. I’ve been trying for years to produce a neon khaki color, which is one of the hardest things ever.

STLMAG: Good lord, how would you do that?

BA: (Laughing). Exactly! I have a couple of close examples, though. One of the things I was thinking about as I was working is how technology degrades and decays over time, all the weird satellites that are floating around the planet that are just junk now—I think that was a big part of my aesthetic, these junk pieces of technology from the 1950s and ’60s that are falling apart up there. There’s like 3,000 or 1700 old satellites up there. A lot more than you’d think.

SF: But he also has these pieces he’s done that are rooted in landscape and topography. Now, the landscape is floating! It’s removed.

BA: That dark painting in the other room is the genesis of that.

SF: And this series of drawings he’s done, I think these are exciting because you can track his mistakes and erasures, and it offers all these different perspectives …

BA: Yeah, you get a lot more information from the drawings than you get from the paintings.   ‘

SF: They’re not quite schematics, and I like that they have these tiny little notions of color.

BA: That’s a piece from a chunk of palette. I make my palettes on these paper plates, and after a year or so you get topography like this (laughs, holds up a cross-section of eight or nine layers of dried paint). It’s like the layers of a mountain.

STLMAG: So, if folks miss the opening, and they just happen to a mom or dad who’s dropped their kid off at ballet class at COCA and wander into Millstone, but don’t have a visual arts background, how would you describe your work to them, if they’re coming into it cold?

SF: I think the works are seductive, even the darker one. So there’s an immediate access, because they seduce you. They do that with color and formal issues and the content, and the conceptual underpinnings reveal themselves slowly, even if you don’t realize them, I think it’s fine. I think they’re curious; you’re not certain what you’re looking at, so you’re trusting your eye and wanting to know more. And then some of them are whimsical. A splat—what’s underneath that, and why’d he do that?

BA: And people can draw association from their own experience.

SF: I think it’s relatively apparent that he’s exploring space … and that’s something we can all relate to, we all have that little kids’ wonder about outer space and engineers and builders of things—that curiosity about how things are put together.