Past Resident
Brian Pera
Brian Pera is a multi-disciplinary artist whose work tends to be driven by early impressions of the women he grew up around and a lifelong curiosity about the part memory, objects, and society play in the ongoing formation of identity through story. His work includes feature films (The Way I See Things, Woman’s Picture, and Only Child), the novel Troublemaker, and the anthology Life as We Show It, as well as installation work, which is often produced collaboratively. He lives in Memphis, TN.
“I like it when the work I’m doing, which I’ve convinced myself should be a form of hypnosis for a viewer, hypnotizes me out of worrying about strategy.”
Q&A with Brian Pera (from Crosstown Arts newsletter, Nov. 11, 2020)
Crosstown Arts residency alumnus Brian Pera is a Memphis-based, multi-disciplinary artist whose work is driven by early impressions of the women he grew up around and his lifelong curiosity about the role memory, objects, and society play in the ongoing formation of identity through story. His work includes feature films (The Way I See Things, Woman’s Picture, and Only Child), the novel Troublemaker, and the anthology Life as We Show It, as well as installation work, which is often produced collaboratively.
Crosstown Arts registrar Jesse Butcher caught up with Brian to discuss how his dog Jody has influenced his artistic process, recent works, and his relationship to his collaborators.
Jesse: You recently started a large-scale video work with Melissa Dunn. Can you walk us through this process?
Brian: I’d been doing research for about a year, building some kind of strategy for getting work done, when my dog Jody got sick, and my plans were upended.
After a few months of mysterious maladies, which the vet and I chalked up to old age, Jody ended up in the emergency room. I was told I could either end her life or prolong it indefinitely through meds and vigilant care. I had zero confidence in my abilities as a caretaker, but that seemed like my only real option.
Filmmaking involves so much planning. It’s all built around scheduling and agreements. Everything is an attempt to fix and lock down and get on the same page. I’d felt tyrannized for a long time by all the planning and consensus-building involved with connected teams of people. You break everything down in a mechanical way to plan a shoot; any change can throw everything off balance. Nearly everything keeps changing.
For the first time, I gave myself comprehensive permission to do what I wanted, to keep things flexible, even when I couldn’t explain why I wanted it. I gave myself permission to be ignorant about my work in ways that provided constant surprise and re-invention.
Caring for Jody slowly liberated me, I think. I was learning more patience and acceptance every day. I entered the residency in a fluid state of mind, intent on doing only what I could as I could. It took me several weeks to get my footing, and gradually, a process evolved.
I kept only the research I’d done, which continued to speak strongly to me under these new circumstances. I knew the piece would probably be about Jody in many ways that I might only gradually understand, which required trusting my instincts, allowing things to float in and out without immediately fastening them to an executable agenda.
Ideas came in slowly, and after the first month or so, I felt I knew what I wanted to do. I knew where I wanted to start. I used that time to prepare and absorb and charted my feelings throughout, hoping to somehow faithfully record in the work what Jody was in my life, what that bond had meant for me. I started interviewing family members, as I knew those attachments were fundamentally similar, something to unpack before it disperses. Not knowing can generate a lot of fear and anxiety, so that was part of my work too.
I’ve known Melissa [Dunn] for over 30 years. After that first month, when I felt more confident, I approached her for a number of reasons, not all of which I understood at the time. Crucially, she’s had deep relationships with dogs over the years, and she operates on a level of surrender in her work with abstraction that I’ve always appreciated. She’s a seeker. I instinctively felt it was essential to put myself in such understanding, ambitiously curious company.
We built a flexible schedule. Every day I was in the building meant paying attention to it in ways I hadn’t before. We started shooting in many of those spaces. We organically worked them into the project. We used what was there: The Green Room, the Art Bar, the grand civic spaces unique to the Concourse. We worked the whole time with Jody beside us.
The history of the building, the ghosts swimming around in there, felt consistent with the relationships I was looking at in my life: the past informing the present, things going on in different guises, carrying alchemical energies forward into new dynamics.
This is a very immersive project. I see some ties to your novel, Troublemaker, and your film, The Way I See Things. It seems there is a Kubrickian tie between all of these projects. Are these works akin to a choir of different narrators singing through their struggles?
The immersion part is just something I really enjoy and have gradually realized is central to the way I’d like to work. That’s taken me a long time to understand and appreciate.
I’d been making films for about seven years when I started what felt like an involuntary re-evaluation. It was great that I could generate, could execute, that I kept going and thinking on the fly, but I wasn’t very happy in my personal life, so all of my drive and commitment merely seemed to be reinforcing a fundamental dissatisfaction. My childhood dreams of being an adult artist didn’t involve that unhappiness.
I knew I needed to work and think differently, but initially the only thing I knew was to retreat altogether. I was also exhausted by the hustle and the pervasive pressure to have one in service of your work. I took a big long break from the imposition of a marketplace mentality on my process.
In an environment where artists regard themselves as brands, there’s a real risk that your work isn’t closely allied to the core of who you actually are, that it’s instead rushed into production to strategically advance the brand, after having been polled through heavily monitored social media engagement and various crowd-pleasing considerations. That’s a lot of pressure bearing down on the sensitivity and reflection art warrants and requires. It weaponizes failure in your consciousness. It creates a false persona.
I’ve gradually realized that my life as an artist only needs to be about making work I enjoy and that I can take as much time as I need. I admire Stanley Kubrick for the time he insisted on taking. I’m more interested in his thoroughness and attention to detail than I am his reputation for being a peculiar genius with peculiar ways of working. I don’t think slowing down is the right way to work, but it fits me better right now.
Immersion allows for a lot of introspection, and wonderful things come out of that for me. The decisions take time and feel reasoned, rather than strictly serendipitously failures or successes.
Tennessee Williams said artists are always making the same work over and over, looking at the same central questions of their lives over and over again, trying to answer them definitively. I can see that everything I’ve done has the unified direction of a burning question. I do think there’s a chorus aspect there, a talking back to experience. The chorus is typically female.
Immersion for me means resisting that constant societal devaluation of deep thought and patient reflection. I feel like more than anything I can generate as an artist, the most valuable contribution I can make is to live my life in ways I often wish the women in my family could have, with firm values in thoughtfulness and emotional engagement. It also means choosing where my mind goes.
You tend to develop ongoing relationships with the collaborators and their influence on the project. Since you’ve worked with some collaborators over such a long period of time, does it feel as though you are able to understand each other in a way helps to give these works a new memory, new language, or new scent?
I don’t feel I ever truly reach understanding with anyone. I’m hopeful — I keep trying — but I fail more than I succeed. Not every collaboration works out, and I don’t always understand why. I like being married. I like that intimacy. I sit comfortably in that dynamic, but I like being a bachelor in my ideas too.
A collaborator can inform the project in ways I like discovering and working through, in ways that no one else would. It’s always a singular effect or influence; another person would bring something entirely different. Making art is an act of faith, an affirmation of hope. To make it with other people feels like a kind of worship. I like that.
Ideally, you work out a shorthand. Some of those relationships can persist across different projects, and sharing that shorthand becomes increasingly rewarding. I’ve done a lot with Terri Phillips, and most of the time when we work, I feel like we’re extensions of each other, thinking together without having to speak much.
It can be stressful, too, because film is a thousand different technical considerations at once, and you have to slog through that to get to the substance. The slog can be manic and frustrating, and I tend to be hard on myself within it. There’s a lot to juggle at once, and I get combustible and fearful under that weight. I can buckle mentally under the pressure sometimes. That can be an impediment for all concerned, especially those who don’t truly understand the pressure’s sources.
Learning my way around lighting, the camera, and other technical considerations involved in filming takes a lot out of me. I’m a fierce luddite at heart, but knowing how to shoot makes me feel like a bachelor in my work where I need to be, so I work hard for that independence. I worked hard to gain it, and I work hard to keep it. When things are working, it feels like I finally know how to be in the world with other people; I have allies. It’s definitely a language, a shared language if you’re lucky. That’s a sense of solidarity I like a lot.
In the last two years, I’ve worked a lot on making sure the circumstances of shooting are what I need them to be, so that I can relax as much as possible into the process and we can all take the bumps gently. I try to be honest with myself about those things before entering the arena with others.
Brian, thank you so much for giving us such a fascinating insight to your practice. We look forward to seeing your new work!
