Brian Bress, 370 Cover, 2015. High definition six-channel video (color), high definition monitors and players, wall mounts, framed, 75 x 75 x 4 inches, TRT 13 minutes, 13 seconds, loop. Courtesy of the artist and Philip Martin Gallery.

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 Los Angeles based artist Brian Bress merges drawing, painting, film, and sculpture to explore the tension between pictorial and physical space. Bress’s films flatten the surreal three-dimensional elements of his work, including bizarre yet comical costumes worn by the artist himself, into shallow scenes. When he hangs these films on the wall, framed like paintings or drawings, Bress creates a portal through which viewers can explore reality, physical space, and their own artistic expectations.

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In the case of 370 Cover, six hidden figures take saws to the striped walls before them. At first delicately disrupting the black and white stripes with thin lines drawn in splinters and dust, the saws eventually reveal the characters who wield them. These costume characters, covered in patterns that run perpendicular to those in their surroundings, each carve out a shape in the wall before them. Despite the creatures’ very real movements in space, their own bodies are flattened into part of the foreground pattern by the camera, rendering the images two-dimensional once more.

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To see more of Brian Bress’s work, check out the artist’s website