BIL BROWN | LENS-BASED ARTIST

 
Bil Brown

Bil Brown


bilbrown@blACKGREYMAG.COM

Los Angeles CA USA

Bil Brown, photographer, is from the Ohio Valley “Urban Appalachian region”, an area well-known for its industrial exploitation, socio-economic impoverishment and “coal hillbilly” stereotypes. His work therefore innately explores identity, wealth, poverty, youth, old age, inequality, protest and the weakness of contemporary culture’s responses to the latter. Bil is an MFA graduate of Naropa University’s Jack Kerouac School where his teachers and influences included co-founder Allen Ginsberg, photographer Robert Frank, and filmmaker Stan Brakhage, In the late 1990s Bil co-founded the “Prague School” of poetics culminating in the Summer festival of international arts Prazska Skola Poetiky. In the 2010s, Bil founded the magazine and subsequent agency Black & Grey and worked editorially for various publications such as FLAUNT, Paper, Purple Fashion magazine and others.

Bil Brown’s visionary imagery captures highly energetic moments and extremities of the conscious world, or the foreboding prescience — of what is to come. Often using his work as a platform for advanced ideas, twisting layers of meaning from editorial image or commercial to street all implying social-change, and excising historical reference addressing current events, Brown pushes the boundaries of his visual language as a “concrete-poetry”

In recent years, Bil has worked with Feminist surrealist Penny Slinger, made a pilgrimage to Memphis to sit at the piano of William Eggleston, bounced ideas off of Magnum photographers Bruce Gilden and Antonie D’Agata, and traveled to Tokyo to absorb the provoking images of Diado Moriyama and Nobiyoshi Araki. Bil says, “cultural lineage was always delivered to me as an important part of any art form, and outside of derivation, I believe in the post-digital age we need to hold on to as many lessons we can from those who came before us. Especially while we can get it from the primary source! Our history is our literacy and gives us the permission to advance!”

Oft an editorial contributor to magazines and periodicals as well as his own Black & Grey magazine. Bil developed the creative agency NINESIXTYNINE, which supports creative production in both the commercial and art space.

Bil lives in Los Angeles, CA with his family and often travels to Europe and Asia, and across the Americas. His collection The Hollywood Cult is forthcoming 2023