Philip Brophy

Full description

Born 14 July 1959.

Working since the late 1970s Brophy’s extensive creative output has covered a huge array of activities from work as an artist, film director, curator and author to collaborative and solo projects as a musician, composer, sound designer and graphic illustrator. Brophy’s aesthetic is an unlikely mix of pop art gloss and horror film grime that is as subversively humorous as it is genuinely unnerving.Brophy’s early works in the late 1970s and early 1980s combined music performance and film and video production. Brophy was the founder of the band [Tsk Tsk Tsk] with Ralph Traviato and Leigh Parkhill. Although numerous other musicians and artists subsequently joined the band on a permanent or just-passing-through basis – and included such luminaries as David Chesworth, Maria Kozic and Jane Stephenson – the band was very much Brophy’s brainchild, and thus a canny meeting of musical style and pastiche adjoined to post structuralist theory. A typical record and accompanying video could be a record and a video as much about disco as it could be be a post modern deconstruction you could dance to. Super 8 films made by Brophy and band collaborators examined tropes of musical presentation prevalent in the then-emerging genre of rock clips, or recontextualised and updated the approach to film narrative, experimentation and documentation pioneered by Andy Warhol in the 1960s and 70s. Films such as Romantic Story (1981), No Dance (1982), Muzak: Rock and Minimalism (1983) and Caprice (1983) are typical examples of this approach and are remarkable for their ...