The Avatar Project: Derek Brahney
Derek Brahney is a multidisciplinary artist based in New York, working across sculpture, drawing, photography, and conceptual illustration. Brahney is the latest artist and collaborator on The Avatar Project. The Avatar Project provides Google designers and engineers with a variety of images, both photography and illustration, that visibly embody Google's core values around diversity and inclusion. Derek’s brief was to bring his style and ideas to what conceptual identity means in representation. After working with Derek for a few months on The Avatar Project, we sat down together for a more personal conversation about the project and his process.
Hi Derek, thanks so much for working on this project and for taking the time to do this interview. Could you please tell us a little about yourself?
Hi, my name is Derek Brahney (pronounced [Brain-NEE] not [BRAh-NEE]), I’m an artist based in New York. I have a background in industrial design and if I were to describe my work in one sentence I would say I like to explore the poetic potential of objects.
Haha, your last name sounds pretty fitting. Okay, let’s start easy. What are you watching, reading or listening to?
Watching: The Louisiana Channel on YouTube – Reading: Meditations by Marcus Aurelius – Listening to: Ambient playlists tailored expressly to my liking via algorithm
Did anything unusual or unexpected happen today?
There is an older, very successful artist whose work I admire that lives in my neighborhood and also has my same initials, D.B. We’ve never met but always manage to be in the same places at the same time. This morning he ended up standing behind me in line in a coffee shop, so I finally introduced myself and we ended up having a really great 25-minute conversation and are going to meet up for studio visits. These chance interactions are one of the things I love most about New York.
What are some of your favorite places in the world or nyc?
World: London, Paris, Copenhagen, Marrakech, beaches, islands, lakes, mountains
NYC: The Met, Balthazar, Ear Inn
Any hobbies?
Getting out into nature: surfing, camping, hiking, anything along those lines, wandering new cities for the first time.
Okay, last intro question - What would you be if you weren’t an artist?
I truly don’t know.
Let’s talk about your art, do you consider your work to be photography, illustration or sculpture?
My work often blurs mediums, even if I try to stick to a certain approach I always find myself introducing other elements. I’ve never been concerned with categorizing what I do, it’s the space in between categories that I find most exciting and natural to operate in.
The work is so fun and thoughtful. What does being a conceptual artist mean to you?
1 + 1 = ?
What were your inspirations for this shoot?
Everyday life, everyday objects and how these objects can act as symbols for complex ideas when presented in a certain way.
Let’s go back to you for a second. What is your favorite artwork/who is your favorite artist?
There are quite a few but if I had to choose I’d probably say the artist I most frequently return to is Magritte.
If you could own one piece of art what would it be?
Salvator Mundi by Leonardo Da Vinci, currently the most valuable painting in the world at $450 million. I would sell it and then I would have enough money to buy a two bedroom apartment in New York City.
What about trends? Which current art world trends are you following?
I keep up with what’s going on, however when it comes to my own work I have to try especially hard to block all that out. The goal is always to get to the core of what I want to say and how I want to say it, and paying too much attention to trends can very much be a distraction in that way. Of course, we don’t work in a vacuum and what I see and hear will find its way into the work in many different ways.
What do you want people to know about the collection?
I don’t know how to 3D render, these images are all of handmade physical models that I built and photographed.
What do you want this collection to say?
My hope is that this collection of images states (in a clear and direct way) the ambiguous, if that makes sense. The brief for this project involved representing ‘conceptual identity’, and I think the most successful images are the ones that involve something very familiar while remaining open to interpretation.
Does your work comment on current social or political issues?
I like to view my images as a sort of prompt for the viewer. When dealing with social, political, or any issues, I prefer not to say or declare overtly, but just to suggest or hint at an idea as if planting a seed in the mind.
Anything else you want to add?
This was a challenging and fun project to work on and I hope the images inspire curiosity and make a few people look twice and smile.