Such dissonance between physical fact and psychic effect is closely related to Brand’s process, which here includes leaving out light-sensitive paper around his apartment, with different segments exposed to a mix of natural and artificial light. The surfaces pick up receding planes, tiers, and mantles of light before ever having entered the darkroom. Not unlike canvases being primed or distressed, these grounds are prepped via daily routine and serendipity. Further entanglements with time-lapse and sequence arise in the manifold steps that follow. Scratched and incised directly on the surface of photo paper, Brand’s glyph-like line drawings can readily alternate between positive and negative according to the given composition. Varied and softened by a contact print process that flips an initial cut—exposing the laceration to light and imprinting its impression on a new sheet of paper below—scumbled nuances of trace and shadow evolve via this generational approach to printing. Whether employed in the darkroom or without, Brand joins the technique of the photogram with his knowledge of advanced color printing ratios to blur and obfuscate the boundary between objective imprint and abstract shape.

A type of silhouette-picture, the photogram is simply defined as a photographic print made from placing an object directly onto sensitized paper and exposing the configuration to light. Any part of the intermediate thing not in direct contact with the paper below requires only the smallest amount of raking light to cast a shadow. This rudimentary procedure—a nineteenth-century device recuperated within an art context by Christian Schad, Man Ray, and László Moholy-Nagy—becomes nearly animate in Brand’s

hands, as the touch and transfer of numerous prints contributes to the oscillating, increasingly agitated effect of recent works. For instance, Untitled (Three), 2008, conveys how the artist has shifted toward filmic possibilities in opening up the work to sequential presentation. The bleached out impression of a Twombly-esque surface, inscribed with cut marks and arced fragments, is registered in a light blue tint and then inverted by flipping the image and making a contact print with contrasting shades and color. Ultimately implying a sequence of motion like that of a flicker film, the images are separated by the blind spot of a black print to form a triptych, thus inserting the structural pause of an overexposed mistake or “distraction” from the printing process—recalling the intervals between film frames and offering an abstract sequence that amplifies the direct animation techniques of Hans Richter, Viking Eggeling, and Harry Smith.

By extending his work beyond the singular frame, Brand enters further into the flow of immediate gesture and superimposition, and his discrete images appear set in motion. In another untitled image, the soft purple gradations projected by the vertical shadows of a table lamp induce the off-center rotational effect of a gyre—à la Duchamp’s Anemic Cinema, 1926—only to be opposed by a flat black swath across the top, returning the image to a painterly target. Part of a series of pictures of absent objects, the work renders a readymade element displaced and unsettled. Green, Yellow, White, 2008, displays double halos orbiting through a green haze, suggesting the flare of an otherworldly circuit

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