Brandon Anschultz

Category: Uncategorized

Sep 6, 2023

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Works on Paper – 2023

New works on paper, all 11 x 14 inches.  Various media: pencil, pen, ink, pastel, gouache, graphite and marker.

Nov 20, 2021

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8.5 x 11 paintings (2021 – ongoing)

8.5 x 11 inch paintings made in mid 2021 and onward…  I use a variety of materials:  mostly inks, acrylics, gesso, oil paint along with a variety of other media and processes.  The paintings are on panels, canvas and linen substrates that I meticulously fashion.

Jan 27, 2020

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A Charm Against All That

a group exhibition curated by Jessica Baran including artists: Brandon Anschultz, Hélène Delprat, Harley Lafarrah Eaves, Trenton Doyle Hancock, Charline von Heyl

January 16 – March 14, 2020 at Projects + Gallery

Images courtesy Virginia Harold and Projects + Gallery

projects+gallery is pleased to announce A Charm Against All That, a group exhibition exploring the impulse toward the magical and the occult in response to catastrophic cultural circumstances. As a new decade begins, we find ourselves awash in anxious precarity — from the unstable fate of our political future to the critical state of the environment — leaving us skeptical of conventional means of asserting control over our circumstances. Therefore, alternative logics — ones that push against established, worldly orthodoxies — gain substantial appeal as viable methods for thwarting unwanted outcomes that have otherwise seemed immune to the precautions and solutions of standard rationale. 

The exhibition is divided into two distinct sections. The main gallery is curated by Jessica Baran and features works by Brandon Anschultz, Harley Lafarrah Eaves, Hélène Delprat, Trenton Doyle Hancock and Charline von Heyl. The rear gallery is curated by Margaret Sherer and includes works from project+gallery’s collection by Chris Burden, Farrokh Mahdavi and Marilyn Minter, among others.

In Helene Delprat’s Lost Sleeping Beauty (2018), layered abstract textures obscure and reveal a world of phantasmagoric imagery — ghosts, ghouls, grinning flowers, elaborate moths — which roil like a witches’ brew of unknown portent. Similarly, in Harley Lafarrah Eaves’ painting Thematic Plot Points In the Wizard of Oz from Childhood Memories (2018) iconic aspects of the 1939 film — Dorothy’s picnic basket, the Wicked Witch’s broom and long, spindly fingers — float in a surreal dreamscape that suggests the power to conjure and possibly alter the past. Both artists’ deconstruction and recontextualization of popular mythologies engage a spell-like rhetoric — at once deliriously desperate and earnestly intentional in their desire to reinvoke the sense of magical agency inherent in childlike fantasy

Also included in the exhibition are four Vodun fetish objects from the Fon people of Benin, which operate as intricate abstract assemblages of string, bones, padlocks and other ritualistic materials while also bearing the potential to function as actual “charms” — for healing, harming or influencing the human experience in some way. In conversation with these objects, Brandon Anschultz’s assemblage sculptures combine bright abstract geometries with personally significant materials — fabrics, jewelry, fur — that memorialize people and experiences of his past while emanating a sense of directed hope.

The rear gallery explores what is implied by “all that” — the moments of anxiety, apprehension, isolation and alienation that often accompany contemporary life. Be it the sleepless nights and resultant mornings that are the focus of the offset lithograph Untitled by Chris Burden (1974) or the uneasy clinical diagnosis of James Hoff’s Social Media Remorse Syndrome (2012), the artworks featured in this segment of the exhibition serve as expressions of a fraught collective consciousness which, in an attempt to soothe our troubled minds, pushes us to find solace and solutions in the unorthodox.  

In all of the exhibited works, the artist is both vulnerable civilian and alchemical trickster, capable of moving between the onslaught of the everyday and the possibility of creative action. 

Jessica Baran

Jul 30, 2018

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Time Won’t Give Me Time – Lambert Airport remix

Time Won’t Give Me Time

Terminal 1 Ticketing Lounge, Lambert International Airport, St. Louis.

Exhibition Dates: May 16, 2018 – November 26, 2018

The works presented here are part of a series loosely titled Time Won’t Give Me Time.  In this work, I am reflecting on my experience of growing up as a gay kid in the mid 1980’s.  In particular, the work examines the deep cultural ambivalences and contradictions that queer people faced in a time of tumultuous change.  On one hand, the work recalls a new sense of possibility for gay youth of the period, who grew up with a novel sense of a broader gay community, as well as exposure to non-heteronormative cultural icons like Boy George and Madonna, who celebrated the joyful creativity of gay club culture and ruled the pop music and music video landscapes. On the other hand, the era also witnessed the AIDS epidemic’s breakthrough into national consciousness, and the trauma of forming one’s sexual identity in the midst of such turbulence.

Joy, fear, rage and sadness.  The two works presented here, Disco (White Triangle, Pink Triangle, Black Triangle) & After Party strive to balance these emotions.

In Disco, three triangular mirror plinths hold three colors of sand and glitter.  Their triangular shape recalls the pink triangle that the Nazi’s used to identify queer people in concentration camps: our Jewish Star.  With the addition of black and white, they can be read as symbols of life and death, depending on cultural associations.  In After Party, a black disco-ball harkens back to the end of the 1970’s.  In this iteration, I am presenting the disco-ball atop a mahogany base, loosely in the shape of the top of a coffin.  The piece is both a celebration and a memorial for the time of transition of the gay liberation movement into the beginning of the AIDS crisis of the early 1980’s.