Bjorn Copeland

Rock musician and artist Bjorn Copeland experiments with visual, physical, and auditory noise. Copeland is co-founder of the experimental rock and electronic music group Black Dice, which formed in 1997 while Copeland was a student at the Rhode Island School of Design. Since then, he has continued to make two- and three-dimensional work, and like his music, much of his art mixes bits of handmade content with found elements. In these bright and loud collages, Copeland appropriates pieces of advertising, film clips, television imagery, mass-produced goods, clothing, and other cultural flotsam. His 2007 collage Money Shot, for example, combines hand-drawn geometric designs with photos of erotic models, American Indians, and fruit. The resulting image is a kind of psychedelic and televisual mash of new, old, and invented images floating through the cultural zeitgeist.

Copeland was a 2001 fellow at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. His work has been included in a traveling exhibition with stops at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, the Museum of Contemporary Art in North Miami, and the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal. His work has also been shown at MoMA PS1 in New York, and he has performed with Black Dice at the Warhol Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and the Walker Center in Columbus.