The Channel Remains Open
Brianna Howard, MFA 2026, Painting
These paintings build themselves through repetition. A single dot holds little on its own, but in relation to thousands of others it gathers into something larger: vibration, surface, field. The mark is both microscopic and structural, intimate in its making yet expansive in its accumulation. The paintings unfold over sustained attention, with surfaces that both record labor and reveal emergent rhythms over time.
A guiding grid organizes the dots without fully containing them. What begins as order slips into misalignment, producing interference, moiré, flicker, and doubling as layers fall slightly out of sync. These effects echo the language of digital breakdown, where images degrade or falter, yet here instability is generative. Form arises through overlap, friction, and tension, with accumulations producing proto-shapes and transient structures that suggest coherence without delivering it.
A lot of what I am tracking is legibility: how patterns emerge, collapse, or glitch across the surface. Each dot functions as a small unit of information. Up close, the marks read as texture; from a distance, they form relational fields that resist singular interpretation. The paintings model how knowledge disperses, shifts, or degrades across systems, and how meaning can be sensed without being fully decoded. Noise is not a byproduct; it is the condition through which the works operate. Perception completes the system, reading or projecting meaning the marks themselves only suggest.
Rather than offering images for quick consumption, these works stage encounters that require duration and attunement. They hold pressure, memory, and interference within the surface. What persists is an oscillation between structure and slippage, clarity and blur, control and drift. Meaning accumulates, destabilizes, and remains unresolved, emerging in the interval between mark and field, order and noise, signal and static.
"The Channel Remains Open" Installation view. Acrylic on canvas mounted on wood. Dimensions variable, Photo credit: John Carlano
"The Channel Remains Open" Installation view. Acrylic on canvas mounted on wood. Dimensions variable, Photo credit: John Carlano
"The Channel Remains Open" Installation view. Acrylic on canvas mounted on wood. Dimensions variable, Photo credit: John Carlano
"If the Air Could Keep Count" Acrylic on canvas mounted on wood. 12” x 18” x .5” Photo credit: John Carlano
"Signals in Blue Distance" Acrylic on canvas mounted on wood. 30” x 24” x .5” Photo credit: John Carlano
"Passage Open" Acrylic on muslin mounted on wood. 24” x 18” x .5” Photo credit: John Carlano
"Sample Skips Here" Acrylic on muslin mounted on wood. 30” x 24” x .5” Photo credit: John Carlano
"The Channel Remains Open" Installation view. Acrylic on canvas mounted on wood. Dimensions variable, Photo credit: John Carlano
"Dead Air" Acrylic on canvas mounted on wood. 18” x 18” x .5” Photo credit: John Carlano
"Edge of Measure" Acrylic on canvas mounted on wood. 30” x 24” x .5” Photo credit: John Carlano
"Liquid Trace" Acrylic on canvas mounted on wood. 18” x 18” x .5” Photo credit: John Carlano
"Between Stations" Acrylic on canvas mounted on wood. 18” x 18” x .5” Photo credit: John Carlano
"Noise Floor" Acrylic on canvas mounted on wood. 72” x 24” x .5” Photo credit: John Carlano
"Signal Ceiling" Acrylic on canvas mounted on wood. 72” x 24” x .5” Photo credit: John Carlano
Brianna Howard is a painter whose work investigates accumulation, repetition, and perceptual systems. Using thousands of repeated marks, she builds surfaces that shift between order and interference, creating optical vibration and subtle instability. Howard earned a BFA in Painting and Printmaking from Boston University (2022) and a Post-Baccalaureate Certificate in Studio Art from Brandeis University (2023). She is currently completing an MFA in Painting at Tyler School of Art, Temple University (expected 2026). Selected exhibitions include Tiger Strikes Asteroid (Philadelphia), Gallery 263 (Boston), Abigail Ogilvy Gallery (Boston), and the Cambridge Art Association (Boston). She has participated in residencies and programs including Anderson Ranch Center and the New York Academy of Art, and her work is included in the permanent collections of Boston University and the Copley Society of Art.
Website: briannahowardstudio.com
Instagram: @briannahowardstudio

