There’s a fluidity to his art, a sense that nothing is every quite complete. “They’re for sale, but it’s process oriented work,” says Brown, “so I keep the props and sometimes I develop them further.”
In some instances, it takes several tries to best capture the image he wants to present. That was the case for “Cheeto Trump.” Brown didn’t like his first attempt at
satirizing the president. “I showed it to my friends,” he says. “Everybody agreed that it could be stronger. I have homies that I show my stuff too when I’m not sure.”
On other occasions, Brown improvises. That tends to happen most often when he’s using magazine pages to create collaged masks and there is a performance element to it. “You’re not improv-ing on a canvas in front of you,” he says. “You are the artwork and I have to look into the camera and the mirror through the art.”
Still, there’s a part of the process that is like art-on-canvas. “It’s like a painting,” he says, “you keep working on it.” For Brown, the end result is the point where the division between himself and the art is completely blurred, where, he says, “you can’t tell what’s real and what’s not.”
Inside Brown’s studio, the past ties to the present and, possibly, to the future. “I like the live-work museum for my own creativity,” he says. “Not only to the present, but I also look to my past for threads and clues and patterns on what is the deeper meaning of my work. Different bodies of work have different relationships and it’s nice to see.”
We project ourselves onto celebrities. Most celebrities are the most boring people, but it’s the viewer, it’s the fantastic nobody, all of us losers, that makes them seem interesting.”
Brown moved to Brooklyn in 1991 and, save for a stint in Europe, has lived there since. He launched his art career around the same time he settled into his adopted hometown. “I didn’t know anyone,” he says. “So, I kind of moved here, got a job, met people and made my way, but I don’t come from the galleries.” Instead, he found an artistic home in underground warehouse spaces that were giving rise to the work of performance artists. Brown made installations and that gave way to performance.
While Brown’s training was as a painter, he admits that figurative painting wasn’t his strength. Through performance art, he was able to compensate for that. He says that he was able to use his body as the figure in a way that he couldn’t accomplish by painting or drawing. Brown’s work often involved him photographed in unusual situations. He spent time dressing as various characters for mall photo shoots. Around the turn of the century, he tracked down Donald Trump for photo ops and posed as high society figure Alex Von Furstenberg (son of fashion designer Diane Von Furstenberg) to crash parties and meet luminaries like Puff Daddy and the Clintons. The latter project was the subject of his first solo exhibition.
“I was interested in not so much celebrities, but the believers, the fanatics, and the fantastic nobodies,” says Brown. Indeed, that’s part of the story behind his current handle; Brown spent a decade as part of a performance art collective called the Fantastic Nobodies. He retains Nobody as his last name for art as a nod to that, likening it to the members of the Ramones.
But, back to the “fantastic nobodies” that permeate Brown’s work. He describes them as “somebody who is faking it until they make it.”
Brown adds, “It’s very American in a way. It’s the party crasher dude who is kind of a loser.”
And that ties to the work he does today in that Brown is still working with masks. “The older work is a social mask, where I’m creating a character who is a mask. My character is an illusion and I’m inserting myself into some sort of social construct,” he says. “The new work is a digital mask. When there is a photo of you, especially on the Internet, that is not you. That is a mask of you or a representation of you. It is an illusion. We attribute it to oneself, so, in a way, the technology has changed the context, but the idea is similar.”
In early 2016, Brown was working a full-time job installing art. After work, he would go into the studio, scrunch magazine pages and stick them to his face. During that period, he says, the photos he shared on Instagram improved. The art was interesting and he started making adjustments to the quality of light and photography. Brown’s David Henry Nobody Jr. images steadily gained a following. He got a boost from Instagram itself later on, when some of his video clips made it to the Explore feature and swelled in popularity. But, that kind of visibility has its problems too, attracting trolls Brown will then block. “I’m very protective of my account,” he says, adding that, in some weeks, he’ll go through a streak of days where he’s blocking huge amounts of people.