Brian Belott
Reassembler 3, Sep 8 – Oct 22, 2022

Reassembler 3 marks Brian Belott's return to Canada with a series of trademark collages: grid-like, meticulous arrangements of strips of paper with color blocked and visibly torn edges. Coming of age during the early aughts, Belott worked among a sea of trash-forward artists, consistently making the best collage work of any of them.

His wide-ranging practice defies categorization, playfully combining dissimilar objects and ideas in a process that could be described as machine-like. Reassembler refers to an idea his late father came up with, a fictional invention called The Reassembler, which could undo the work of paper shredders stitching documents back together and making what is private become public. Once assembled, Belott’s father had the idea to sell them back to the original owner on eBay.

Belott started these particular works while holed up in Vermont, having fled the city – the striated lines of collage mimic the green horizon he saw out the window. Vertically, they might read like a filmstrip of reconstituted children’s books. His mode of reassembly evinces a deep reverence for found materials. Sources include ripped-up pages from 1970’s catalogs, text book illustrations, children’s coloring book pages, and fragments of finger paintings with unassuming strokes, dots, or combs of psychedelic, fruity colors. The series builds upon his other madcap painting-object hybrids such as his “puff paintings,” made with cotton balls, calculator works made of stones and gems, and freezer collages (objects and painted bits of paper suspended in ice,).

Brian Belott (b. 1973, East Orange, NJ) is an artist, curator, performer, and publisher based in Brooklyn, NY. He is the lead archivist of the Rhoda Kellogg International Child Art Collection. He received a BFA in 1995 from the School of Visual Arts, NY. His work has shown at The Journal, Brooklyn, NY; LOYAL, Malmö, Sweden; CANADA, New York, NY; and Galerie Zurcher, Paris, France. Notable exhibitions include Call and Response, Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, New York, NY (2015); Jeunes Créateurs à New York, Musée d’Art Moderne de Saint-Etienne, Saint-Etienne, France (2014); and Draw Gym, 247365, Brooklyn, NY (2013). His work was featured in the 2019 Whitney Biennial. Belott’s work is included in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. He lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

In conjunction with the exhibition, Canada will publish a catalog with an essay by Ross Simonini.

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