I asked Brian to furnish me with some of his snapshots so I could put together a slideshow, to present at the Versionfest 4 , Nfo Xpo, networking fair, April 28 and 29, 2004, at the Chicago Cultural Center. Brian has kindly obliged.

I've always liked the pictures Brian takes. He seemingly has hundreds of stunning and strange pictures. If Brian brings a camera on a trip or to some event I can count on him later providing me with some really great, embarrassing photo of me. I think many people know people who do this, it is an indispensable service as far as I am concerned.

But he is serving something else with his picture taking. There will be several other shots: the sky, a gas station, a corner of a building, a confluence of wires, a tree or shrub row , and a part of someone's body. I don't know what Brian is thinking when he takes these photos. Most of them seem very singular to me, it's not some kind of grand photographic inquiry that Brian is making on the world. This is a spontaneous appeal that happens between Brian's precious sensitivity and moments, forms, spaces, and objects he comes acrsoss. Brian serves this appeal by taking these pictures.

Some of his pictures look like snapshots I have taken or that I have seen other people take, but some are completely outlandish and unfamiliar. They could be organized into groups, in a million different ways using a million different criteria, I'm sure. I know that Brian culls his snapshots--he does not keep every picture he takesãbut probably this process is mysterious even to Brian, as mysterious as the process of taking the pictures.

Since Brian is a good sculptor it occurs to me that one way to look at these pictures might be to think of them as representations of fictional sculptures, pictures of sculptures that Brian sees, or that he wants to see in the world. I wonder if Brian would be annoyed by this idea, as he sometimes seems to be by the things I say (and that is quite understandable).

Friendship Bio

Brian is one of my oldest friends. I've known him since around the time we graduated from college (yeah, art school). I met him through a former girlfriend. I remember the night when we really connected , we connected quickly. We were at a small, two bedroom apartment, where he was living with his girl friend of the time. I was a dinner guest along with my girlfrined of the time. After dinner and a few drinks Brian showed me his studio/bedroom and we started talking about the paintings he was working on. It became a really lively conversation about his work and about art in general. I think Brian would agree with me that our ongoing conversation about art that began that night is one of the best things in life.

Mike Wolf
April, 2004