Bryan Krueger is 22 years old and notices eerie parallels between himself and Michael Scott from The Office.

MOSSLESS: How was your experience with your mentor, Kathy Ryan?
BRYAN KRUEGER: It’s really funny to think about how one transitions from thinking about an idea as an object into experiencing it and, in turn, making it part of their reality.  When I first digested the fact that I had been given the opportunity to work with Kathy Ryan I wasn’t sure how I could assimilate that into normality.  I let that get to my head. When I visited the New York Times building for the first time, it felt like I was in some surreal 80’s movie montage where some college student couldn’t quite find their bearings in the fancy corporate building – I went to the wrong front desk, I dropped my portfolio, I couldn’t figure out the elevators (hint: the buttons are on the outside). But once I got to the right floor Ms. Ryan welcomed me warmly and gave some of the most direct critique I’ve had – all with a personable and encouraging touch.  Her approach reminds me a lot of Penelope Umbrico’s, who teaches at SVA. I can credit my thesis advisor, Barbara Pollack, with breaking me out of my comfort zone and forcing me into work that meant more to me than ever before, while I credit Kathy with focusing my divergent rampages (caused by excitement) within that first 20-minute meeting.  I was pleased to find her consistent enthusiasm and support throughout the subsequent meetings we held.

ML: Can you tell me something about your work and how you exhibited it? (click here to see how Bryan exhibited his work)
BK: Gladly – I guess I can start by saying that the work tends to tiptoe on the line between illusion and disillusion. The subjects of the photographs I’ve been making are either directly mitigated through digital interventions or are repeated through drawing.  In either case, I am interested in harkening in the viewer the act of looking at this flat thing that has the immense power to embower the viewer in a displacing illusion. I like the idea of enacting the viewer’s gaze in the completion of a composition that has missing parts. I became really interested in this idea of projecting personal counterparts onto a photograph during my time working at a photo lab in San Francisco. Mounting slides and trimming prints increasingly made me feel disillusioned from the actual content of imagery by the sheer amount I was ingesting that I began placing myself, the people I know and the places I’ve been into the pictures.  Suddenly, someone’s 2-month African safari turned into a Krueger family reunion in Phoenix, Arizona. I like to think about photographs as having this flexibility and believe they do by themselves – as demonstrated above and, of course, in those found in mass culture – but I am interested in pushing this a step further in my own practice in order to highlight that flexibility.

For the Mentor show, I approached the presentation of the photographs just as I approached the making of the photographs themselves.  Given the way I want to engage the viewer’s attention while looking at the images, it seemed almost antithetical to fix the prints in frames – the frame seems so final in relation to this work. Despite the several layers of mediation the photographs themselves present, the frame would impose a finality that, in my mind, would be reductive to my efforts in making the viewer a part of the photograph’s reading. By pinning them as loose prints to the sheet of wood that mimics a wall, I hoped to freely expose the prints to each other (since they vibe off one another) as well as to the viewer. 

The leaning of the wood wasn’t so much an afterthought as it was introduced by the fact that I bought wood that might have been a little too heavy to adhere to the wall with only four nails. I do feel, however, that my over confidence serendipitously added a nice layer to the presentation.  The leaning wood fully breaks away from the wall – a break that, in my mind, echoes the way in which the images break the passive gaze onto the images themselves.  This idea of breaking the gaze is pushed further by the fact that the prints are well below the conventional “viewing height”.  In a show with so much to look at, I like the idea of the prints being on the verge of escaping view yet retaining their own private presence.

The small grey prints, which hang just above the sheet of wood, represent the early stages of the trajectory into the color photographs pinned to the wood.  What separates them is the way in which they were made (via Risograph printer) and the fact they are purely about stripping away information, whereas the color prints are about building up information and subverting it – both methods, however, are meant to engage the viewer similarly.

ML: What has your most memorable moment been at SVA?
BK: Having my first meeting with Stephen Frailey and noticing the color of his office walls compliment his eyes very nicely.

ML: What are you going to be doing this summer and onwards?
BK: That’s the question, isn’t it! It’s probably that question alone that fosters productivity after graduation due to the neurosis it instills…or not. In all seriousness, I’m planning on staying here in New York for as long as I have productive things to do. I somehow weaseled my way into working with a former teacher of mine from SVA – which has proven to be a dream set-up. If I don’t bug her too much, I’ll hopefully help her out well into the summer, perhaps onwards. Other than that I’ll be working on things in the fall with LMAKprojects, a great gallery located in the Lower East Side.  Eventually I’m looking to go back to Graduate school – but have not thought about those specifics too deeply yet…

In any case, you can find me soaking up the California sun for the month of August.  I’ll be there for a party that my parents are having – in a strange way it is associated with my graduating but has more to do with mini burritos and margaritas.