Dek Unu Magazine - Christopher Paul Brown

Multi-disciplinary artist Christopher Paul Brown is a photographer, film-maker, musician, and writer. He also practices “alchemy,” a process by which he converts abandoned industrial sites in Chicagoland’s Fox River Valley to the opposite. In his abstract images, the reds, browns, and greys of oxidized metal, broken equipment, and weeds become blues, purples, greens and golds. Solids become transparent. Positives morph into negatives. His work is, according to him, play, and his artistic destinations are completely unknown to him until they appear, by a kind of involute magic, on the screen in front of him. Methods he developed as a performer and producer of improvisational music and experimental film show up again in the ways he inverts, reverses, separates, rephrases, combines, and transforms the parts of his visual compositions. This is art in the moment, not the spawn of photo history. This is not the staid and studied art of the academy; it is both antique and contemporary. It is alchemy.