brian bartz
is an interdisciplinary sculptor and educator living and working in Berkeley, CA. He completed an MFA in art practice at UC Berkeley in 2020, and received a BA in fine art from Reed College in 2017. His work has been shown across the United States, including at the Berkeley Art Museum, Well Well Projects, Pallas Gallery, Soldes Gallery, and more. He is currently an adjunct professor in art and design at the University of San Francisco.
Through his work, he seeks to defamiliarize our relationship with technology, often by making electronic sculptures with functions that are speculative, useless, poetic, or simply for their own sake. More recently, he has been particularly captivated by the aesthetics of communication technologies such as radio and satellites, and the ways they interact across landscape and place. Some of the research interests which animate his work include depictions of terraforming in science fiction, the present day effects of cold war militarization, and, more recently, the relationship between technology, mysticism, and the cosmos.
