brian bartz
is an artist and educator living and working in Berkeley, CA. He holds an MFA from UC Berkeley, and a BA from Reed College. His work has been shown across the United States, including at the Berkeley Art Museum, Pallas Gallery, Well-Well Projects, Root Division, Aggregate Space Gallery, and SOMarts Cultural Center, among others. He is the recipient of several awards including the San Francisco Foundation Cadogan Award, the Eisner Prize for Excellence in Creative Practice, and the Kaspar Locher Fellowship. He is currently an adjunct professor in art and design at the University of San Francisco.
His practice is invested in using digital technologies sculpturally, foregrounding their material. He inverts viewers' preconceived notions of what a "device" might look or act like by creating confounding DIY electronic sculptures. In this act of defamiliarization, Bartz gestures towards a speculative future in which everyday technologies might appear alien and have uses outside of the extremely narrow framework we currently conceive of them in.
