Philip Brophy
Philip Brophy's work constitutes reworking pre-existing media, composing film, music and soundscapes, mixing, mastering, installing and presenting audiovisual work in surround sound environments.
Brophy's achievements range from early musical experimentation, underground performances of deconstructed disco to reconstructed soundscapes for rock video clips and new original scores for Japanese anime.
As a writer and speaker on art, Philip Brophy specialises in three areas: audiovisual media and technology, comics, graphics and associated mass media and Pop Art in its historical and contemporary forms. He is published in all three areas internationally. His book projects in development include The Body Horrible and Colour me Dead.
After a series of experimental mixed-media works exhibited over many years, Brophy has consolidated his interests to produce a range of audiovisual works focussing on his key interests in pop, sex and music. These recent works include Evaporated Music exhibited at Anna Schwartz Gallery, Melbourne, and the installation Fluorescent commissioned for the Contemporary Art Projects at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney. His first major interactive work is the interactive digital animation The Body Malleable commissioned by the Digital Media Fund.
The theory and practice of Brophy's art career to date has been one predicated on a movement between contexts. While a sizeable portion of his work is presented in galleries, other work such as his films and recordings operate in exhibition and distribution channels, which rarely can be aligned to the prescribed parameters encompassing the museum and the art gallery. Ultimately, Brophy's practice is interdisciplinary through contextual positioning e.g. a rock video clip in a contemporary art museum etc. and hybrid through formal execution e.g. immersive surround sound videos.
It has always been of major importance to Brophy to strategically facilitate the ways in which people respond to his work. The New Media Arts Board Fellowship offers Brophy the means to obtain a clear overview of his practice and address the overall context that aligns his work. The primary objective of the Fellowship is to make this evident and holistic by centralising these modes of production within a clearer and accessible voice. Brophy comments:
'I aim to make my research--demonstrated through my published articles, books, curated exhibitions and programs--and my production - evidenced through my films, videos, CDs, performances and presentations--be more closely aligned. This alignment I feel is crucial to the progressive and investigative nature of interdisciplinary research and hybrid production and presentation.'
Brophy's work operates in the realm of hyper-experience where the audience is taken to another emotional and intellectual realm that extends their imaginative possibilities in ways that often could not be foreseen. In the words of artist Stuart Koop 'Everything Philip has touched has turned to brilliant cult'.
Brophy is concerned with the offbeat in art and culture and investigates the gaps in both by using interdisciplinary and highly original techniques. In doing so he has created highly alternative and occasionally controversial work. Brophy comments:
'Having encountered Marcel Duchamp, John Cage, Andy Warhol and David Bowie at an impressionable age, my predilection to the perverse and the playful has not diminished as my career has progressed. I have found great productivity in channelling their modernist and 'pre-postmodern' quips, claims, theatre and subterfuge into the socio-cultural arena of making art.'
His current projects in development include the multi-screen animation installation Les Pop Musique Plastiques, Steriotype and Un-Family. He is also in pre-production curating a major retrospective on the Manga of Osamu Tezuka for the National Gallery of Victoria and the Art Gallery of New South Wales.
Brophy's Fellowship program will be devoted to consolidating streams of his practice in order to explore the nexus between the theory and practice of his work over the past 15 years. This will involve taking stock of the professional calibre of his recent, current and proposed works, ascertaining their relevance in both national and international contexts and forging ways to present the works both in Australia and overseas.
Philip Brophy teaches media at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, Melbourne.