ARTIST / EDUCATOR

SPRING/BREAK Art Show, New York, 2018

BRIAN PAUMIER

BRIAN PAUMIER'S work is profoundly autobiographical. He maps his eclectic personal history through portraits and still lifes, drawing freely from his memories of influential family and friends, his ties to Mexican culture and traditions, his experience as a soldier, and his life as an artist with growing up in Oxnard, California. Balancing polarities and exposing rituals he celebrates the essence of culture in an effort to collapse stereotypes and preconceived ideas. His practice is intercultural and his approach interdisciplinary. Weaving a deeply personal but universal narrative while incorporating nontraditional materials that veer toward an image-object. His lens based work chronicles one man’s quest for identity, masculinity, and equanimity. He received his MFA from ICP/Bard and his BFA from Art Center College of Design. His work is in various public and private collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, The International Center Of Photography, the 21c Museum Hotel, and Beth Rudin DeWoody collection.

EXHIBITIONS

RECENT WORK

The new series UP, DOWN, UP, DOWN, LEFT, RIGHT, LEFT, RIGHT, B, A, AND START links 1980s pop culture with conceptions of the military, technology, entertainment, and religion. It connects arcade games from the era to Paumier’s own monomythic journey into the army and his subsequent spiritual quest for redemption while speaking to the lure of the exotic and the leap to nostalgic transference. Mounted prominently, large light boxes gleam like revived relics; images of toys and trinkets are enshrined in scaled-up game monitor bezels framed with brightly colored, powder-coated aluminum. In another display, a nearly life-size toy spaceman stands at attention on an adhesive photo print mounted below an obscure, vintage marquee that reads “Amigo.” Finally, several ultra-thin LED light panels emblazoned with portraits of cartoonish curios are conspicuously plugged into power, all neatly in a row.

The Oxnard Plain Collective

June 7 through August 12, 2018

The Oxnard Plain Collective, a venture that aids in the development of emerging area artists interested in lens-based art at the CAM Studio Gallery. This inaugural exhibition, created and displayed by the The Oxnard Plain Collective and mentored by Brian Paumier, Jaime Bailon and Amy Elkins includes the work of theirs alongside the works of Jack Adams, Nathan Asplund, Hugo Castillo, Mark Giorgione, Joseph Ipatzi, Rob Ipatzi, Shamsi Luna. Working parallel with the Collective, the CAM Studio Gallery continues its guest artist studioship program.

New Art Projects, London

Thu 03 May 2018 - Sat 30 Jun 2018

Act Of Faith seeks to personalize the political, and celebrate connections, differences and beliefs that are shared and differ between American and Mexican culture. The relevance of this intervention stands out as an act of faith to protect the shared cultural benefits in a diverse America, today.

SPRING/BREAK Art Show, New York

March 6 - 12, 2018

The Referential In-Between takes on many forms through self reflection, sensory perception, audible visual tactile signifiers with an emotional cross cultural relationship combined with shared heritage experiences. Within this spacetime coordinate cultural symbolic similarities build mass existence through physical objects and energy projection. The Referential In-Between uses these methods to expose intentional references for observers to have a self cryptographic experience of refection and enlightenment.