| In Review: Brent Green at CVA |
| Written by Ken Hamel | |
| Thursday, 07 February 2008 | |
 (L to R) Metro State Art Dept. faculty member Sandy Lane, Artist Brent Green, CVA director Jennifer Garner, CVA assitant director Cecily Cullen The subtitles serve more as a clever sidebar to the frenetic narration that accompanies each work; half poetry, half stream-of-consciousness rant, each film is driven by Green's voice as storyteller. In the film "Hadacol Christmas," the soundtrack plays like a Velvet Underground cover band, with Green's voice sounding like a modern Lou Reed, intensely building to a fever pitch as he relates the story of his grandfather's slow descent into cough syrup induced depravity. The most exciting aspect of Green's work is how the primitive elements of his style—the exposed masking tape, the misshapen and exposed animation cells, the sharpie-drawn characters—never detract from the story, rather they become an integral part of the action and each characters' personality. And Green works not just in animated cells, his film "Carlin" uses stop-motion action that includes flying chickens pulling a diabetic woman in a wheelchair through an abandoned house. While Green is now a hot property, widely reviewed in a number or prominent publications, he was keen to point out his self-made roots and his rise to fame by sending copies of films to his 5 favorite artists; he encouraged the Metro State students to throw away their portfolios and get their work in front of their would-be mentors. While the mail campaign was a novel twist, his real success came after receiving a Creative Capital foundation grant that got his work in front of the art world and into the tony NYC Bellwether Gallery. Outside of Creative Capital, Green is self-taught and skeptical of formal education: "So much art is informed only by art and that bores the shit out of me." At 1 minute of screen time per MONTH of work, Green's films are a rare commodity. If you can't make it down to the CVA to see his films first-hand, you can catch a glimpse at his website: http://nervousfilms.com. - KLH |
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