Perth, Western Australia
Bryans creates prints, digital paintings, and screenprinted artworks. Using ephemera and retrospective themes, he manipulates fragments of time from the ‘utopian nuclear family’ era.
Artworks: 2
Do you remember your childhood?
Do you remember the feeling? The wonder, the innocence?
For myself, it was a childhood full of daydreams and wonderment. Growing up on an idyllic farmlet, I spent my days wandering through the bush, giving my imagination free reign. The bush, calm, secluded, and full of life. The night sky filled with a million stars and vanilla milky-way, and the thousand colours in a single blade of grass.
Now, as an adult, I manipulate and appropriate fragments of those times from my (embellished) memories, along with the books and ephemera of my childhood to capture those moments that we treasure and make us who we are.
My artworks have often been referred to as ‘bedtime story’ assemblages. Using themes from the 1950s, the ‘age of innocence’, such as the utopian nuclear family or my own ‘Enid-Blyton-esque’ children. Creating artworks (screenprints, digital paintings) of innocence, purity, kitsch, nostalgia…
My artworks, however, leave out particular details. There are no facial features. Items that my characters are gazing in wonder at are beyond the frame or are non-existent. Like our childhood memories, there are gaps, voids, and an absence of detail that gets filled in by our adult selves. The viewer has to narrate the rest of the story.
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