STATEMENT
My work responds to human interactions with a uniquely modern material: plastic. Using collected single-use plastic and found objects from the waste stream as art medium, I attempt to blur the lines between appetizing consumables, biological dissection and everyday waste, to explore layers of meaning in an age where toxic materials of our own creation have saturated our environment and penetrated our species, both biologically and culturally, to the cellular level.
I react to modern consumer-saturated society, and process my own environmental and climate despair by drawing attention to the role plastic production and dependence plays in the global climate crisis.
My sculpture and wall relief works depict abstracted glimpses of microscopic cell interactions, molecular-level contamination, a cross-section of interconnectedness, imagining how this human-made material interacts with living systems at the deepest level.
With organic forms and textures that allude to perishables, I explore the dichotomy of decay and timelessness with a material that will never decompose yet is completely integrated into the food web. I am recording a material fingerprint, a time capsule, that implicates contemporary social values and attitudes surrounding environmental conservation, consumption, waste and how these affect our own bodies.
A renewed poetry practice has grown alongside this work, finding its way into the same terrain by different means. Where sculpture asks what plastic leaves behind in the body and the ecosystem, the poems ask what accumulates in memory and language: wonder, complicity, grief that doesn't always announce itself. Both practices begin in the ordinary and the overlooked, and follow the material wherever it leads.
ARTIST BIO
Bryan Northup (Grayson) (he/him) is a queer poet and visual artist based in Oak Park, Illinois, whose work in both mediums turns on the same question: what do we discard, what endures, and what does that cost us?
Since 2015, his sculptural practice has transformed single-use plastic into wall reliefs, sculpture, installations, and wearable art. Rolling, compressing, and slicing found materials using heat and pressure that echo geological processes, he renders the invisible visible: cellular contamination, molecular interconnection, the deep-time origins of a material conjured from ancient carbon that will outlast us by millennia. His writing extends the same inquiry into language, finding in words another material to compress and examine, one that holds ecological grief, wonder, and complicity in equal measure.
In 2019 Bryan was one of 12 artists chosen for the South Bend Museum of Art's Biennial 30 and was awarded Juror's Choice for his installation "You Can't Put It Back In the Box." His solo exhibition "Sea Inside" debuted months later at the International Museum of Surgical Science in Chicago, closing weeks before the pandemic began. He has since exhibited in two-person exhibitions at the Evanston Art Center and the Ukrainian Institute of Modern Art, and was among two dozen designers invited to make fashion out of plastic for Trashion Revolution 2024.
His visual work has been exhibited nationally and internationally at venues including Berry Campbell Gallery (Chelsea, New York), the Czong Institute for Contemporary Art (South Korea), the South Bend Museum of Art, the International Museum of Surgical Science, Bortolami, and the Beloit College Wright Museum of Art, among others.
His debut poetry chapbook, Ongoing, Unknowing, moves through wonder, complicity, and ecological grief, finding deep time inside ordinary things. Work has appeared in Oberon Magazine, the nature anthology Nature Knows the Way, and Beyond Queer Poetry.
He holds a BFA in Fine Art Photography from California College of the Arts and brings over two decades of experience as gallery director, curator, and exhibition preparator to his current role as Executive Director of the Oak Park Art League, a nonprofit gallery and teaching studio operating since 1921. Born in Los Angeles, he lives and works in Oak Park with his husband, two sons, and a cat named Moira Rose.