Brackin

Brandon Anschultz

2002 MFA
Washington University
St. Louis, Missouri

1997 BFA
Louisiana Tech University
Ruston, Louisiana

Using Claude Shannon’s schematic diagram of a general communication system from his text The Mathematical Theory of Communication, my creative process follows his insight, using its basic structure to map how I approach making my work. This list provides a visual passage or course that allows me to explore through a broad yet structured process, freely entering it at various points and using it in random order. I tend to respond to its “substitutionable” nature, and tend to modify it through either other means or comparable parameters.

The Information Source provides the first step in my conceptual process whereby I start the selection and modification of materials and/or material improvisation. This initial step can be both complicated and simple, generally beginning with natural materials or organic forms. A piece of hardwood, scraps from a construction project or even an object specifically constructed for a singular idea provide starting points that come from the study of science, science fiction to topical interests, ultimately though, these references are lost quickly.

During what Shannon describes as the Transmitter stage, I begin to rigorously transform gathered information by crafting the material, applying a lustrous and seductive finish, or slightly altering a particular color and/or combining it with other objects or materials. This particular stage of production is where I analyze previous decision-making and where I look to specific instances in the object that could benefit from a sort of tension, literal and metaphoric. By following this transformation of information, my transmitter now exists.

The Noise Source is a point of further abstraction, translation, and editing. At its most basic, I begin to physically draw the objects, reducing certain details by flattening or submitting them to a hand/eye filter. Drawings of those drawings are made, information is lost, digitally manipulated drawings are re-drawn, collection is continued, visual artifacts accumulate and images emerge.

In reference to my work, the ultimate stage Receiver/Destination are paintings. My chosen surfaces are either composite plywood panels or stretched canvas. The plywood panels mimic the layers of information below the solid color surface. The drawings, in their more reduced form, become about color. My color strategies range from direct, simple yet beautiful combinations, to more acidic or jarring juxtapositions. Displaced colors provide the most interesting challenges in terms of my formal practice, not quite green, quasi-brown, a sort-of gray, but when used in the context of glaring blue or fluorescent orange, these choices create the “vibe” of my palette.

I’m interested in different points of entry, individually or working as a refined circuit. Working from this diagram, my paintings become a physical translation of these ideas on the transmission of information and its movement through mapped stages of source, translation and receivership.

Brandon Anschultz
April 2008