As an artist, I crave the sweet moments while working when I slip beneath my own conscious control. While making art, I seek to lose awareness of the outside world and of myself. I am free when working from within, untethered to expectation and thought, even if what comes to the surface is the worst experience of my life.
-Brian David Dennis
My practice moves between large-scale installations and intimate collages, incorporating paper, photography, digital montage, found materials, and self-portraiture. Whether constructing soaring towers from coffee stirrers or discovering lost worlds in fragments of street trash, I extrude the extraordinary from the common. Materials are rarely passive in my work: they buckle, overlap, cast shadows, interrupt one another, and transform the surrounding space.
I rummage through the art canon as freely as I gather physical materials. Each project and process determines its own sources. Francis Bacon’s tormented figures, Josef Svoboda’s theatrical environments, and the discipline of Minimalism coexist within a practice that is intuitive, layered, and emotionally charged. Balance, tension, surface, and scale remain central to everything I make.
An autobiographical current runs through my work, although I rarely illustrate a specific event. Memory is fragmented, diffused, and reconstructed through layers. Architecture becomes psychological space; the body becomes a place of vulnerability, aspiration, estrangement, and reclaimed agency. The work moves between document and invention, physical fact and emotional truth.
The piece itself is the subject. Meaning arises through the act of making—through the moment when materials, memories, and impulses form relationships I could not have consciously planned.
Brian David Dennis was born in Pennsylvania in 1959 and has lived and worked in Philadelphia since 1984. He grew up in a home with movable walls, designed by his father, an aspiring artist. The openness and fluidity of that modular environment captured his imagination, while his mother, a kindergarten teacher, encouraged his independent thinking and constant building.
Dennis studied drawing and painting at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Initially drawn to stage design, he ultimately sought the more personal expression offered by the fine arts. He gravitated toward collage and assemblage, and by the mid-1980s was creating installations in which the architecture and character of the exhibition space became integral to the work.
His practice now encompasses mixed-media collage, installation, photography, digital montage, and self-portraiture. Through layered and often fragile materials, Dennis explores the body as a site of memory, aspiration, vulnerability, and reclaimed agency. Architecture, distance, identity, and survival recur throughout his work, which frequently moves between physical fact and psychological invention.
Dennis began exhibiting with the Philadelphia cooperative Vox Populi, where he remained an active member for fifteen years. He has presented solo exhibitions in Austria and at the Philadelphia Art Alliance and Sande Webster Gallery, and was selected for the Fleisher Art Memorial’s prestigious Challenge exhibition. His honors include an Independence Foundation Fellowship in the Arts. In 2016, he was commissioned to create an installation for Longwood Gardens.
He lives and works in Philadelphia with his husband, painter Keith Breitfeller.