Brice Bischoff: How Close

Brice Bischoff: How Close by Galina KurlatFebruary 18, 2024

Front cover, How Close © Brice Bischoff, published by (w)hole, 2023

How Close by artist Brice Bischoff is a series of sublime interventions at Red Rock Canyon in the Mojave Desert. These otherworldly images document the landscape while interpreting the past, present, and possible future through a 4×5 camera and color film. Many of these images frustrate the viewer by obscuring large swaths of the composition using spectacular light leaks or endless darkness in the center of the photograph. Bischoff tantalizes his viewers with the possibility of looking deeper into the landscape and of seeing beyond what is visible, while he relinquishes little information. We are left with a desire to see beyond what is obscured, but mostly to keep looking.

Red Rock Canyon is a site of imagination and rich in history; Bischoff addresses both, in picture and word, paying respect to the Kawaiisu (Nüwa), its dwellers for millennia and the fact that many a Hollywood film has been been made there: from American westerns to classic science fiction. Bischoff’s interpretation of the land in pinks, mauves, and velvet browns is stunning yet fabricated. He is both a witness to the land and an architect.

Bischoff’s initial in-camera interventions blur the photographs, transcending documentation. As the project continues, these images evolve into land art as otherworldly glass sculptures intersect the iconic landscape. Graceful, poised, and flowing, they inhabit the ridges they rest on as though they have always been and always will be there long after we are gone. Only in the broken remnants of a few do we see the fragility of this enterprise and the precariousness of our current time.

How Close is published by (w)hole Books in Los Angeles, CA. The monograph is an edition of 500, 12×10 inches, 168 pages, 74 color plates on uncoated paper. The linen hardcover with the front tipped image is debossed and foil-stamped.

Insta: @brice_bischoff

Web: www.bricebischoff.com

Publisher: (w)hole

Title Page, How Close © Brice Bischoff, published by (w)hole, 2023

How Close

Inspired by the ethos of land art and the aesthetics of science fiction, my work creates sensorial connections to energies the earth emotes as it changes. I work amongst the intersections of photography, land art, sculpture, and performance.

In my debut monograph, How Close, I delve into intimacy, vulnerability, and human connection. I showcase my five-year artistic journey at Red Rock Canyon in the Mojave Desert, capturing the shifting light and sublime landscapes through the lens of a large format camera on color negative film. The result is a collection of mesmerizing photographs that blur the boundaries between documentation and artistic intervention.

More than just a collection of images, How Close is transformative. My photographs offer a visual allegory for an immersive exploration of deep time and the profound connection between humanity and the natural world.

Through experimental, long exposure in-camera effects, sculptural interventions of glass among other materials, and improvised movements for the camera, I create a captivating narrative that speaks to our place within the fabric of existence.

The monograph further elaborates on the past, present, and possible future of Red Rock Canyon through a poem. In the poem I acknowledge the complexities of representing Red Rock Canyon, given photography’s role in settler colonialism of the American West and the site’s portrayal as a film setting in countless Hollywood movies. The poem re- contextualizes the photographs by engaging the nuanced relationship between art, history, and the landscapes we inhabit.

Page 37, How Close © Brice Bischoff, published by (w)hole, 2023

Brice Bischoff is an artist using photography to implement strategies of land art and the aesthetics of science fiction to investigate personal relationships to the earth as it changes. His work is in the collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Orange County Museum of Art, and the New Orleans Museum of Art among others. He has shown work at the MAK Center, Los Angeles, the Orange County Museum of Art, the Penthouse Art Residency (Harlan Levey Gallery), Brussels, and Bozo Mag, Los Angeles. His debut monograph was published in Spring 2023 by (w)hole.

Bischoff received a MFA with a concentration in photography from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2008. He was raised in New Orleans and lives in Los Angeles where he serves as a Lecturer of Photography in the School of Art at California State University, Long Beach and California State University, Fullerton.