“One of the characteristics of photographs that I am drawn to and remain excited about is their ability to present something familiar/recognizable and transform it into something that feels like it is being seen for the first time.”
—Bryson Rand
Zeit Contemporary Art is pleased to present Bryson Rand: The Floating Bridge, an online presentation of photographs made between 2014 and 2016. The show takes its title from Yukio Mishima's novel Runaway Horses, from a passage where a dying man recites a poem about crossing from the world of the living into heaven by way of a floating bridge.
The thread running through this body of work is an attempt to give visual form to something that stays just out of reach. "I don't know if I think of this other realm as 'Heaven' or even a place necessarily. I think of it more as energy," Rand says. He draws on the histories of gay people over the last 50 years as a kind of working material, shaped as he is by the mark they've left on his own identity, even if the realm itself is hard to put into words: "it feels almost impossible to put my understanding (or lack thereof) into words. But by making photographs with other gay men, and in spaces that hold an important place in my personal history and those of the broader gay communities, I can get close to describing this other realm."
Sexuality and desire sit at the center of Rand's work. His photographs hold self-acceptance, repression, guilt, desire, shame, violence, love, and empowerment together, often within the same frame. They move through queer spaces, nightclubs and gatherings in private apartments in New York and Los Angeles, setting violence and intolerance against eroticism and an unguarded look at the beauty of nature and the male body. Photography's power to hold memory and build community runs through all of it. "Just the act of making these pictures and showing something that tends to be ignored or hidden is a powerful political statement," Rand says.
About the Artist
Bryson Rand was born in 1982 in Phoenix, Arizona, and lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. He studied at the University of Colorado Boulder and the School of Visual Arts in New York, then received an MFA from the Yale School of Art in 2015. Around the time of this exhibition, his work also appeared in the solo show Some Small Fever at La Mama Galleria, New York (2017), along with group exhibitions curated by Katy Grannan and Jack Pierson. His relationship with Zeit Contemporary Art continued in 2020 with two further online exhibitions, The Shadow Has a Dream and the two-person show The World Within, and he went on to residencies at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (2019) and the Vermont Studio Center (2024). More recently his work has shown internationally, including in Hovering at Capsule Venice (2024) and Capsule Filling at Capsule Hong Kong (2025). His photobooks include Waters (Dashwood Zines, 2017) and The Origins of Color, made with Vincent Tiley (Raw Meat Collective, 2018). His work is held in the collections of the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art, New York, and in private collections including that of Bill Arning.
Stories
Interview · Ron Gregg · January 25, 2020
Ron Gregg in Conversation with Bryson Rand
Ron Gregg, Senior Lecturer in Film at Columbia University, sat down with Bryson Rand to discuss the most recent developments in Rand’s photographic practice. Their conversation considers crucial aspects of image construction, including photography’s documentary nature, the use of black and white, the relationship between the model and the photographer, and the pursuit of beauty. It also explores the connection between bodies and nature in Rand’s work, revealing shared forms of violence directed at LGBTQ communities and the planet.
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