Brett Wexler, Origin of a Postmodern Artist
Brett Wexler is a Photographer, creator of Digital Images, Fine Art, Paintings, and Drawings. He builds artwork around landscapes and nudes. Wexler's art draws from Renaissance painting, semiotics, alternative technique and totemic magic. An internationally published photographer of the male nude, his images appear in 4 books on 3 continents (including Abrams Books and Prestel). The Studio is located in Tribeca with a summer studio in East Hampton, NY. He has taught in a division of the Museum of Modern Art (Amagansett). The site includes a secure on-line shopping cart to buy originals or high quality signed prints,canvases,and greeting cards.
Brett Wexler, alternative media, cyanotypes, panoramas
Brett's art explores the creation of photographic imagery. He began by studying classical painting and drawing. Early in his career, Brett sought to create graphically powerful Black and White images of the nude male. He chose this subject matter as a social comment against the anti-male image prejudices of the day. In his travels, he shot and captured landscape images. While many artists struggled to develop a unique style to enhance marketability, Brett followed an architectural notion to let the form follow the interior--or in his case, the medium, an idea already cultivated by Man Ray and others. Then, with the rapid advance of computer based images, Brett became fascinated with moving images from computers to celluloid and back. While many others focused on perfect prints, Brett focused on creating perfect negatives using the array of alternative media from nineteenth and first half of the 20th century techniques as well as panorama and digital manipulation ssoftware algorithms as they became available. His negatives, sometimes more than 4 square feet in size, printed as cyanotypes and silver albumin images-- some of the largest ever created. Choices of media were often influenced by totemism and magical concepts (cyanotype, made with cyanide was used to portray the social danger of controversial images of male-male affection.)
Postmodernism and Brett Wexler
As professional photographers struggled to amass the $25,000+ for a medium format digital camera back, Brett turned to computer based digital mathematics to create giant wall art photomurals with dozens of fused 35mm size single images. In the pursuit of these images, Brett was confronted with the problematic definitions of Postmoderism. His travels showed him how the salient feature of postmodernism called appropriation is also fundamental to Rubens' Venus and Adonis which stole and reversed the composition of the eponymous Renaissance painting of Titian. For Brett, this was little different from Richard Prince's appropriation of the Marlboro Man. So Brett began to believe that the role of the postmodern artist is to encourage viewers to come to terms with and navigate the explosive and dizzying array of moral, visual, and social possibilities provided by modern technology.Art History, Semiology and Brett Wexler
Scholars such as Susan Sontag and Roland Barthes believe that a photograph kills its subject. Brett believes the visual pleasure of imagery opens doors to the relationship between the subject, the artist, and the viewer, and the question of which is which. He believes that confusion between codes of nakedness and nudity which make some viewers cringe and confuse beauty even erotic beauty with some form of degradation can be fixed with exposure and enlightenment. He is indebted to the legacy of Titian's eye (who probably used a camera lucida), to Giotto's and Caravaggio's vision of the body, to Monet's and Corot's color. He is indebted to artists like Weston, Cartier Bresson, and Ansell Adams whose images went far beyond freezing the reality of the moment.