Bryan Northup

Bryan Northup is a Chicago based environmental artist, utilizing found or collected single-use plastic as art medium. He attempts to blur the lines between appetizing consumables, biological dissection and everyday waste to explore layers of meaning in an age where plastics have saturated our environment and penetrated our species—both biologically and culturally—to the cellular level.

Bryan turned his attention to the problem of single-use plastics in 2015, using these toxic and enduring materials to create wall relief and sculpture works that mimic and abstract food. The works are constructed with techniques mimicking a sushi chef’s: rolling and slicing, but using all manner of single-use plastic as the ingredients.

Using the resulting three dimensional slices, or sections of rolled single-use plastics as mark-making devices, abstract wall reliefs and sculptural works are created in an attempt to imagine how these very plastics are interacting with living systems at the deepest level. With this work, Northup hopes to record a material fingerprint, a time capsule, that implicates contemporary social values and attitudes surrounding environmental conservation, consumption, waste and how these affect our own bodies.

Bryan graduated from California College of the Arts in Oakland, California with a BFA in Fine Art Photography. His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally. Bryan was born in Los Angeles and currently resides in Oak Park, IL.

Available Works

Instagram: @bryan.northup
For purchasing, high-resolution images, or other details, please email: artistbryannorthup@gmail.com
To learn more about Bryan Northup, please visit: www.BryanNorthup.com