Brendan Albano

Portfolio

Press

• "Mr. Boat-Head's Electrical Dream Ship makes you think about narrative conventions" in the Georgia Straight.
• "Tiny Parties fulfills sloppy, sexy expectations" in the Ubyssey.

Artist's Statement

My practice is rooted in a playful antagonism that feels out the invisible architecture of social behavior. I am interested in disturbing the narratives of day-to-day living through the aestheticised rearrangement of the cues and contexts that control who does what where. My tactics draw both from commonplace social interactions: telling a story, attending a party, and from more confrontational acts such as graffiti or theft. In Tiny Parties, the architecture of a house party—complete with its five essential components: a keg, a DJ, a dance floor, a couch and a semi-private closet—is compressed into an eight-foot cube at the center of the gallery. The is no enforced capacity on the party space, but its small size demands a level of intimacy absent from the emptiness of the gallery, creating a constant circulation of people driven by sweat and body heat.

Our ever-accelerating technologies of transportation and communication offer a bewildering array of means by which groups of people can organize themselves to work, live, entertain, govern and educate themselves. I am interested in these structures of interpersonal interaction. I am interested in taking them apart and putting them back together again. In Casual Stories Project, small audiences are brought together to see what is ostensibly a play ("Mr. Boat-head's Electrical Dream Ship") at the Vancouver International Fringe Festival. There is no performance, instead, audience members are asked to contribute stories, dreams, lies and poems to an online archive of casual storytelling. Tea and cocoa are provided.

The framework of Jacques Ranciere's “distribution of the sensible,” (as in that which can be sensed) is a useful approach to exploring these social narratives. Ranciere writes: “Politics revolves around what is seen and what can be said about it, around who has the ability to see and the talent to speak, around the properties of spaces and the possibilities of time” [1]. My practice is an investigation of these properties and possibilities of space and time, and the interfaces for human interactions that they support.

1. Jacques Ranciere, The Politics of Aesthetics, trans. Gabriel Rockhill (New York: Continuum, 2004), 13.

Curriculum Vitae

Education

University of British Columbia
BFA Visual Arts, Minor in Theatre, May 2011
University of BC Medal (in Fine Arts)

Visual art

• How do you sleep with yourself? (group), UBC Visual Arts Grad Exhibition, 2011
• Playground (solo), UBC AMS Art Gallery, 2011
• Artist in Residence (award), UBC Alma Mater Society, 2011
• Effects become causes (group), UBC AHVA Library Gallery, 2011
• MESH (group), UBC Dorothy Somerset Studios, 2011
• Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing (group), UBC AMS Art Gallery, 2010
• Tiny Parties (solo), UBC AMS Art Gallery, 2010
• Im/Perfect Bodies (group), UBC AMS Art Gallery, 2010

Theatre

• Mr. Boat-head's Electrical Dream Ship/Casual Stories Project (director, creator, performer), Vancouver International Fringe Festival, 2011
• Our Time (director), The Cultch (IGNITE! Youth Week), 2010
• HAIR (set designer), Waterfront Theatre (Fighting Chance Productions, 2010
• ...Are You In? (performer, co-deviser), Theatre SKAM, Centre for Digital Media (HIVE 3), 2010
• FEAST! (director) at HIVE—The New Bees, Russian Hall (Vancouver Fringe Festival), 2009
• Lovestruck (set designer), Dorothy Somerset Theatre (UBC Players’ Club), 2009
• Semantics of Romantics (director), The Wise Hall (IGNITE! Youth Week), 2009
• Spring Awakening (set designer), Havana Theatre (Delinquent Theatre), 2009
• Armitage (director), Havana Theatre (UBC Players’ Club), 2009