Contained Illusions: Experimental Films and Photography by Susan Brockman, 1965-1999

April 6 - May 11, 2024, 636 Broadway, Room 320, NYC

Contained Illusions is the second exhibition at Soft Network with the Estate of Susan Brockman (1937-2001). This presentation features Brockman’s photo-based work from the 1990s alongside her films and video from the 1970s-1980s. Brockman was a prolific filmmaker, film editor, and photographer but was also extremely private and didn’t seek out critical attention. This exhibition provides space for discussion of an elusive artist’s legacy and the consideration of issues particular to film and photography archives. Brockman’s photographs and films are inviting yet enigmatic, melancholic yet playful. They capture something fundamental about film and photography and its primary ingredients of light, frame, illusion, and the pleasure of looking.

Brockman was fascinated by the framing of spaces and experimented incessantly to create what she described as “a more literal and almost palpable sense of another dimension within the realm of photography.” From the mid-1980s until around 1999, when she was diagnosed with cancer, she altered her color photographs through painting and collage as well as constructing various framing devices. Brockman’s approaches were influenced by the ideas she was absorbing as an active figure in art scenes in downtown Manhattan and East Hampton since the 1960s and in Tribeca beginning in the 1970s, especially her interest in dance and the use of photographic appropriation. Brockman primarily photographed objects, interiors, and landscapes. She was drawn to the dense and careful groupings of objects at flea markets, to details of artworks and interiors, and to domestic spaces, often gravitating towards light sources such as windows and lamps. From her earliest films to her photo-based experiments, she is aligned with artists who would become known as the Pictures Generation. The current exhibition includes examples of unaltered photographs from her extensive archive, a selection of her Chromogenic prints, photo-constructions and one of her “sliding photos.”

While Brockman only exhibited her photo-based work on five occasions in her lifetime, her films had a wider audience due to her participation in Women Artist Filmmakers, a feminist experimental film collective founded in 1974. The two films included in Contained Illusions, Depot (1974) and Hothouse Flower (1978) were first digitized by Soft Network in 2022 in collaboration with the Estate. The digitized film of Hothouse Flower presented here is a new 4K restoration made possible through a 2023 grant from the Women’s Film Preservation Fund of New York Women in Film & Television, overseen by Soft Network. We are also pleased to be presenting Brockman’s video Soul of a Dog (1987), likely for the first time publicly. Soul of a Dog is a meditation on belonging based on Franz Kafka’s short story “Investigations of a Dog.” It was made using hundreds of images Brockman shot on 35mm color slide film of her beloved dog Dutchess and includes live action and green screen techniques.

Contained Illusions concludes Soft Network’s year of fully-funded support for the Estate as our second Archive-in-Residence and is the most comprehensive exhibition of Brockman’s work to date. A chronology of the artist's life was produced as part of the exhibition and compiles the research conducted as part of this residency. A small catalog with essays about Brockman is forthcoming in 2025.

Contained Illusions: Experimental Films and Photography by Susan Brockman, 1965-1999 is organized by Soft Network with Sofia Ohmer, Curatorial Assistant.

Soft Network would like to thank Mirra Bank, Richard Brockman, and Darling Green.

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Join us for a presentation on material that was recently digitized in collaboration with the Feminist Institute’s Memory Lab. Three artists will share material from their personal archives and two artists will share material from archives with which they have been deeply connected.

Susan Brockman (1937–2001) was a filmmaker and photographer active in NYC and East Hampton, NY from the 1960s–1990s. She received her Bachelor of Fine Arts in painting from Cornell University, NY in 1958, studied photography with Diane Arbus in 1973 and cinematography at New York University in 1974. Brockman was an active member of the collective Women Artist Filmmakers and she lectured at the School of Visual Arts, NY; New York Public Library; Montclair State College, NJ; and the University of Cincinnati, OH. She received numerous grants in her lifetime including awards from the Jerome Foundation; the National Endowment for The Arts; and the New York State Council on the Arts. Brockman was editor of Arts Magazine from 1966-68 and worked with a wide range of influential figures in the film and art worlds throughout her career including Willem DeKooning, Robert Frank, Ralph Gibson, Dan Graham, Sally Gross, Peter Hujar, Mark Obenhaus, Kazuko Oshima, Linda Rosenkrantz, Danny Seymour and Anita Thacher among others.