A Brief Explanation of the Series Bronson Caves
(2009-2010)
The Bronson Caves are located in Los Angeles‘ Griffith Park and are famous as a stage set to countless motion pictures and television shows. The caves are actually man made and were originally a rock quarry during the early 1900s used to lay streets for an expanding Los Angeles. A hundred years of filmmaking has occurred at the caves imaging events from explosions and gun fights to the discovery of cave paintings. Reflecting on this history, the caves are documented on various formats and film stocks over time as an unchanging landscape amidst a chaotic specter of fictional realities.
In the series of photographs titled Bronson Caves, the caves served as a stage set yet again. I performed actions for the camera with massive sheets of colored paper. Since a long-exposure photograph was produced rather than a motion picture, the papers were recorded as voluminous, glowing colors. The materiality of the rainbowed forms, emerging from the mouth of the cave, dancing about the canyon, and bubbling up from the ground, are based solely in the photographic process, and can only be experienced when viewing the final photographic prints. If a visitor to the caves were to accidently stumble upon my performance they would only see a mass of crumbled colored paper draped awkwardly over a man moving/dancing to a camera positioned on a tripod. The goal of these performances was to create sculptural, photographic objects that interacted with the history and architecture of the caves.
Brice Bischoff is a Los Angeles based artist, born in New Orleans, LA. He received his MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2007. In 2007, he was a member of the art collective, Self Made, who ventured on a 22-city art tour across the United States and Canada. In 2010, he participated in New Orleans‘ Prospect 1.5 Biennial curated by Dan Cameron and exhibited his photographs in a solo show at Lemieux Galleries, New Orleans. His work is in the collections of the Ogden Museum of Southern Art and the New Orleans Museum of Modern Art. Recently, Brice showed in Oakland at Johansson Projects, and he has an upcoming solo show in Los Angeles at Kopeikin Gallery (March/April 2012).
To see more of Brice’s work please visit his portfolio
☞ www.bricebischoff.com
