bio
bio
Brendan Coyle is a multidisciplinary artist specializing in performance art, digital art, drawing, installations and sculptural works. He is the author and illustrator of a self-published comic detailing the landscapes of an interior mythology, and is co-founder of Second Saturday Staten Island Art Walk—a fountainhead for the revitalization of the arts in the Staten Island community.
Brendan completed his BFA in Sculpture and Extended Media, minoring in Painting at Virginia Commonwealth University, and came to New York in 2002, where he became a core member of a trans-generational performance group: The Assembly. He then went on to co-found the salon-styled exhibition space, The Assembly Room, which remained at the center of Staten Island's burgeoning art scene for 3 years, providing a local venue for collaborative and experimental works of practically every medium.
The bulk of Brendan Coyle's work develops the characters and motifs of a personal mythology that he has been investigating since he was 15 years of age. His performances and installations have been featured in the US and internationally (most notably, in Poland and Japan), and the New York Times recently ran a feature article on his life and work at The Assembly Room.
He is presently finishing assemblage sculptures and working on a novel that develops key aspects of his ongoing mythology.
statement
statement
In terms of a highly stylized mythology, my work seeks to engender a mythic time within a correspondingly new realm of experience. It seeks to reflect the organization of the contemporary world in terms of an alternative symbology. While it's not a private language, strictly speaking, my work can be viewed as a creative restatement, or inverse reflection of what a large number of people experience in industrialized societies.
My work generally attempts to give material form to an attitude of social criticism. I often like to fashion works from industrial waste, for example—the expressive character of "garbage art" being adequate to convey elements of Hobo City, the focal point of my developing mythological world: a place where an enclosed concentration of people are forced to sustain life amidst unbridled waste. It is my belief that Hobo City is patterned on existing realities, and that in many respects we are immersed in decay, surrounded by a self imposed inhibitor identified in my pantheon as "The Fat."
All art has the function of simplifying reality or offering a worldview that can be understood and felt by the imagination. To enact this necessary simplification, I use recurring characters and motifs as tools towards the rediscovery of the world we daily inhabit. In Hobo City, masses of people daily undergo a process of degradation and devolution at the same time as they partake in an ongoing evolution. This reflects our world, where people's interests too often reflect the bias of a certain social class, and whose narrowing outlook works against the richness of human experience, enveloping us like a fat that renders us immobile, reducing us to static categories.
My art is informed as much by emergent technologies as by a kind of neo-primitivism. A mythic character is essential to my work, which recreates the features of the modern world in terms of imagined realms. In performance, in sculptures, in video art, and in drawings I give expression to mythic sagas and other symbolic structures that correlate with our discordant society. Ultimately, my work seeks to confront the dispossession of our lives and personalities head on, guided by the belief that art is essentially communicative, exhibitory. Interactivity, then, and the fostering of community are intrinsic to my art; and I'm always searching to establish deeper connections with a wider audience.
