Brian Day turns inward with self-portrait series ‘Game Theory’
The exhibition is up at Ferndale’s M Contemporary Art until November
By Randiah Camille Green, October 20, 2023, for the Metro Times
In Brian Day’s latest exhibition Game Theory, we’re struck by an image of the artist hoisting a typewriter over his head as he stands in a nondescript body of water. The water is up to his neck with a top hat obscuring his face. Whether he’s emerging from this vast sea that could swallow him — or sinking into its hungry jaws — is up to you.
In Game Theory, on display at Ferndale’s M Contemporary Art, Day delivers a series of portraits in his signature black-and-white style. In the portraits, Day feels like a specter — a top hat-clad shadow man existing between swirling streaks of light.
We’re more used to his drone photography capturing the grooves and lines of Detroit streets. It won first place in architecture at the International Photography Awards in 2018 and was compiled into a book, Detroit from Above, released on Peanut Press in 2021.
In that series, Day documents Detroit’s architecture from an aerial perspective, turning the buildings and streets we see on a daily basis into abstract monuments, like behemoths that came from another dimension and found themselves frozen in place.
His photo of Hubert Massey’s 2020 “Power to the People” mural that Massey painted with high school students on Woodward Avenue, was featured at the Detroit Institute of Arts’ Conscious Response: Photographers Changing the Way We See exhibit alongside work by Gordon Parks, who Day has cited as one of his early influences.
In Game Theory, he’s abstracted himself, turning inward to inspect what it means to be human.
The exhibit aims to probe whether AI-generated images will ever replace, or otherwise devalue, artistic work made by human beings. An artist statement for the show reads, “Game Theory examines the conflict and inevitable reconciliation of technological progress, authorship and identity that we all face with AI as we look to the future.”
It declares that self-portraiture can be a means of self-reflection, examination of change over time, documentation of the artist’s existence in the present and contemplation of the future, or simply a tool of technical mastery. In Game Theory, Day does all of the above. The photos are asking the viewer to consider their relationship to technology — past, present, and future — and how both humans and technology morph over time.
Perhaps, like the typewriter, AI-generated art will eventually become obsolete — a time capsule of days bygone. But so, in time, will man, as he either sinks into an ocean of self-inflicted destruction or disintegrates between the crashing waves of time.
Where to see his work: Game Theory is on display at M Contemporary Art until Nov. 18. An opening reception will be held from 6-9 p.m. on Friday, Oct. 20; 205 E. Nine Mile Rd., Ferndale; mcontemporaryart.com.
