Dan Browne

Life cycles of a garden visit.

A campfire for warming eyes and sight, somewhat akin to TV static. Produced by accident and chance, all the images in this film are achieved via tactile impact, the soundtrack acoustically interpreting the same abrasions.

"The images of “Memory Fade” are not lost… they are spectral and the dance steps repeated over and over in time fights the Fade – a falling down that breaks the spine of the book of life (mankind)."

"A collage of decaying kung fu trailers strewn on a sidewalk close to my house. I reassembled them as best possible, from start to finish, incorporating as much as possible of the various bits found and adding my own touches of improvement." -Dan Browne.

A meditation on timeless landscapes and the transience of vision.

Three brief garden glimpses from the perspective of an insect or a grain of pollen. An attempt to capture, in the words of Marie Menken, "the flying spirit of movement within these solid objects."

Midway is composed of five rolls of Kodachrome Super 8 stock purchased from the Kodak plant in Toronto during the final days before it closed permanently. The rolls were already expired upon their acquisition, but despite this I held onto them for several years, waiting for a subject that would warrant the expenditure of such rare material. I eventually settled on the midway of the Canadian National Exhibition, a three-week long fair held annually in Toronto at the end of summer, after having working there for two years as a sound technician. The mechanical spinning rides, most of which have never been updated since my visits as a child, formed a suitable dance partner to my camera as a pair of declining technologies both still able to impart kinetic thrills.

A meditation on light and water; landscape as self-portraiture.

memento mori is a layered exploration of the total photographs captured over the course of a lifetime – over 100,000 in total. This personal archive, the dizzying documentation of a life, represents a plurality of subjects, objects, thoughts, dreams and experiences, forming an encyclopedic index of the possibilities of sight.

A record of textured surfaces and passing thoughts on an uneventful Sunday spent in quiet contemplation at home, accompanied by the passing memories of defocussed lights on a somnambulistic nighttime streetcar journey. Collaboration with Goran Simic for LIFT Poetry Projections II.

Impressions of a day in primary colours, applied to the eyes via paint, ink and clear leader.

An adaptation of the painting by Duchamp in commemoration of the centennial of its exhibition at the 1913 Armoury Show.

Quanta is an investigative record of patterns found in the observable Universe, as contained within the perceptions of a Bolex taken for an afternoon excursion in a rowboat.

Numbers was created during a trip to Manhattan, where I caught my self-reflection in a glass door that read ‘41’ after having photographed the number 42 earlier the same day, and subsequently continued hunting until I found everything else between 1 and 100. Dedicated to Hollis Frampton. – D.B.

"Tree rhythms in the backyard of my parents’ house" -Dan Browne.

An ode to my daily environment, and to the presences of two beings: one arrived recently, the other recently left. The images merge in dreamlike passages that reveal the infinity of the potentials of vision within the finitude of everyday objects.

One of the purest representations of dreams.

Two film strips illuminated by passages of water: one aboard a ferry crossing the English Channel at day, the other on the banks of the Seine river at night. The soundtrack is generated directly by the projector 'reading' the images shot in Super-16mm.

As above, so below. Inner and outer realms collide in this audio-visual meditation on the surfaces of perception, as a wide range of archival materials and found footage from early Edison films to contemporary satellite images are deployed through a process of improvisation with live image-mixing software, conjuring an extended hallucinatory space-time journey.

This work was created in response to Christian Lebrat's installation, "R1R2R3R4 (Who's Afraid Of...)". Through rapid panning and tilting the camera it became possible to convert the installation's curtain panels into flickering colourful textures, reminiscent of "Holon" (1981).