The art of Brian Delano
Manifesto
I see my art as the distilled, tangible excretions of my experience. For me, making art is multifunctional; I record my perspective and daily experience through art, I explore forms of novelty and find purpose in my experience, and I cope with the “anxiety of being” by immersing myself in the creative process.
The materials and methods available to modern artists are overwhelming. There is no way to master every creative process the world offers us. I lack the attention span necessary to be one of the best (or top ten, or even top thousand) in any given artistic field, so I strive for the creation of novelty through the unique combination of materials, subjects, and processes. I pursue the competence and confidence to produce art in any medium from welded steel and paper mache, to digital animation and 3d printing.
My art should inspire the creative potential in anyone who views it. I see art as a self-propagating tool, a process in constant evolution which alters the minds it touches and ripples ideas and personality into the distant future. Art offers the artist temporary immortality and memetic reproduction of their mind into others.
I find my greatest artistic inspiration in the caves of our long-forgotten ancestors, the works of impressionists in the late 19th century, the pioneers of surrealist art in the early 20th century, and the animators and illustrators of the post-modern era these previous movements inspired.
On "Capital Drugs"
The relationship and interaction between visual and aural sensory input has always fascinated me. From music videos to mixing consoles, being able to link motion and form with sound always feels like some type of magic.
My current work is an exploration of multimodality and re-contextualization. I start by harvesting audio clips from archived, mid-century footage dealing mostly with the cultural reaction to increasing psychedelic awareness and exploration and the growing interest in futurism. I remix and heavily effect these audio clips while arranging them with rhythmic patterning and associations into an audio track. I then create a visual collage by layering effected video clips from these same archives over the audio. The final layer in these pieces is freely associated, hand drawn, frame-by-frame animation.
My goal with this work is to reference the re-arrangement and layering of information that occurs in the human mind. The multimodal information we absorb during the course of an exploration of a subject is never held exactly as it is presented. By dissecting, effecting, and rearranging this information, the original intention of its creator can either be completely lost or twisted into something else entirely. By re-evaluating propagandized art from the last century in this fashion, and through the lens of an observer some 70 years removed from their creation, I hope to shed light on the nature of what (and how) we are processing the constant flood of information and sensory stimulation in the current world.
In this work I am pulling heavily from my own deconstructive self-exploration, disillusionment with modern (and historical) narratives on the dangers of challenging cultural norms, and the psychedelic experience inherent in combining video and audio formats. I am drawing a lot of inspiration from Dadaist collage art in the formal presentation of these pieces, as well as in the subject matter they explore.