
BIFF OFFSCREEN: DE PROFUNDIS
Burchfield Penney Art Center
Lawrence Brose's three part, hand-processed, experimental film based on Oscar Wilde's prison letter DE PROFUNDIS.


On view on October 15 only at Burchfield Penney Art Center.
Cabin Boy - Longing for First Mate, from the series Crossing the Line, 2015, phorogravure printed on Hahnemuehle Museum Etching Paper, 16 ½ x 10 ¾ inches (image) 30 ½ x 22 ¼ inches (paper), 35 x 27 ¾ inches (frame)
Burchfield Penney Art Center, Gift of Deborah Abgott, 2024
This free, Offscreen installation will only be on view for one day during the fest – don't miss it!
Exhibition copy and phorogravure scan courtesy of Burchfield Penney Art Center.
Many thanks to CEPA Gallery and Burchfield Penney Art Center.
About the artist:
Lawrence Brose was a Buffalo, NY-based experimental filmmaker, photographer, and arts administrator. His films have been exhibited at international festivals, museums, art galleries, and cinematheques in the United States, Europe, Asia, Australia, and South America. Brose held the position of Executive Director of CEPA Gallery in Buffalo from 1999 to 2009.
In 1989 he began work on FILM for MUSIC for FILM, an ambitious series of collaborations with contemporary composers exploring the relationship between the moving image and music. (Among his collaborators on the project were John Cage, Virgil Thomson, Conlon Nancarrow, Yvar Mikhashoff, and Frederic Rzewski.) His 1997 film DE PROFUNDIS, a 65-minute hand-processed work based on Oscar Wilde's prison letter with an original score by Rzewski, has been screened at more than sixty venues and festivals worldwide. In an artist’s statement, Brose described his work as “cinepoems which build on the vertical layering of experiences rather than a more linear structure familiar to the narrative form.”
An unidentified observer later provided this explanation of the artist’s aesthetic: “Lawrence Brose is working in a well-established tradition of image appropriation, drawing specifically on images of masculinity in home movies, old films, Gay erotica and documentaries. Brose collects found still images, which he then processes and re-processes to find more depth in the picture, producing complex layers of imagery that are highly conceptual and offer a poignant commentary on normative conventions of gender and sexuality.”
Brose’s prints are part of several private collections and have been exhibited at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery (now Buffalo AKG Art Museum), CEPA Gallery, Big Orbit Gallery, Studio Hart Gallery, and El Museo Francisco Oller y Diego Rivera in Buffalo, NY; Triskel Arts Centre, Cork, Ireland; Jack Tilton Gallery, New York City; and Fosdick-Nelson Gallery, Alfred University. His work has also been exhibited at Burchfield Penney Art Center in Buffalo, New York, and is included in their collection. He has been invited to place his films and career-related documents on deposit at the George Eastman House, Rochester, New York as part of their permanent collection.
For more information on Lawrence Brose, visit lawrencebrose.com.

Lawrence Brose's three part, hand-processed, experimental film based on Oscar Wilde's prison letter DE PROFUNDIS.

Human bodies are physical instruments that move us through the environments we inhabit – they generate, amplify, and modulate meaning.
Read more
Since 1990, filmmaker Lynne Sachs has collected 600 business cards—together they form an archive of encounters.
Read more