Susan Brockman

Contained Illusions is the second exhibition at Soft Network with the Estate of Susan Brockman (1937-2001). This presentation features Brockman’s photo-based work from the 1990s alongside her films and video from the 1970s-1980s. Brockman was a prolific filmmaker, film editor, and photographer but was also extremely private and did not seek out critical attention. This exhibition provides space for discussion of an elusive artist’s legacy and the consideration of issues particular to film and photography archives. Brockman’s photographs and films are inviting yet enigmatic, melancholic yet playful. They capture something fundamental about film and photography and its primary ingredients of light, frame, illusion, and the pleasure of looking.

Brockman was fascinated by the framing of spaces and experimented incessantly to create what she described as “a more literal and almost palpable sense of another dimension within the realm of photography.” From the mid-1980s until around 1999, when she was diagnosed with cancer, she altered her color photographs through painting and collage as well as constructing various framing devices. Brockman’s approaches were influenced by the ideas she was absorbing as an active figure in art scenes in downtown Manhattan and East Hampton since the 1960s and in Tribeca beginning in the 1970s, especially her interest in dance and the use of photographic appropriation. Brockman primarily photographed objects, interiors, and landscapes. She was drawn to the dense and careful groupings of objects at flea markets, to details of artworks and interiors, and to domestic spaces, often gravitating towards light sources such as windows and lamps. From her earliest films to her photo-based experiments, she is aligned with artists who would become known as the Pictures Generation. The current exhibition includes examples of unaltered photographs from her extensive archive, a selection of her Chromogenic prints, photo-constructions and one of her “sliding photos.”

While Brockman only exhibited her photo-based work on five occasions in her lifetime, her films had a wider audience due to her participation in Women Artist Filmmakers, a feminist experimental film collective founded in 1974. The two films included in Contained Illusions, Depot (1974) and Hothouse Flower (1978) were first digitized by Soft Network in 2022 in collaboration with the Estate. The digitized film of Hothouse Flower presented here is a new 4K restoration made possible through a 2023 grant from the Women’s Film Preservation Fund of New York Women in Film & Television, overseen by Soft Network. We are also pleased to be presenting Brockman’s video Soul of a Dog (1987), likely for the first time publicly. Soul of a Dog is a meditation on belonging based on Franz Kafka’s short story “Investigations of a Dog.” It was made using hundreds of images Brockman shot on 35mm color slide film of her beloved dog Dutchess and includes live action and green screen techniques.

Contained Illusions concludes Soft Network’s year of fully-funded support for the Estate as our second Archive-in-Residence and is the most comprehensive exhibition of Brockman’s work to date. A chronology of the artist's life was produced as part of the exhibition and compiles the research conducted as part of this residency. A small catalog with essays about Brockman is forthcoming in 2025.