For the past fifteen years, I have worked primarily in video; however, my practice is research-based and includes performance, garment design, drawing and writing. My work is essayistic, combining animation and documentary style video footage with found materials and imagery from Hollywood films, YouTube videos, text messages and public records to tell stories about identity under capitalism.

Since 2018, my art practice has been engaged with questions around the financialization of art, and the ways that artworks become vehicles to launder money, evade taxes and secure loans. In 2018, I started a series of works about Jessica Manafort, a little-known filmmaker and the daughter of Paul Manafort, Donald Trump’s former campaign chairman who was convicted of money laundering. In 2018, I made a video called Jessica Manafort that re-edited footage from her first film, a teen drama called Remember the Daze, combining it with court records, hacked text messages and media reports to ask if it was financed with laundered money. In 2020, I made a video called 1550 Blue Jay Way about a series of real estate scams perpetrated in Los Angeles by Jessica Manafort and her former husband, Jeffrey Yohai, using a similar tactic of combining public records research with appropriated footage from her films.

In 2021, I began my ongoing project, Private Client Services, a performance and series of videos in which I attempt to launder money through art acquisition. This project has received support from the Guggenheim Foundation and Creative Capital, which has enabled me to work with a lawyer and visit several international tax havens. As part of this series, I’m currently working on a “travel video” called Offshore that follows me as I travel to the Cayman Islands, Hong Kong, Switzerland and Luxembourg, exploring the relationship between tax havens, art storage and the radical inequities of the art market. I’m interested in the ways that artworks leave the studio to become financial mechanisms for the super-rich, often operating against the economic interests of the artists who made them.

I am a 2023 Guggenheim Fellow, a 2022 Creative Capital awardee, a recipient of the LENS Award at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Fellowship for Visual Arts at the California Community Foundation and the City of Los Angeles Individual Artist Fellowship. My work has been exhibited internationally at venues including MoMA, Art in General, the MCA in Chicago, and the Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève. My projects have received press coverage in The Paris Review, CBS News, Art Agenda and the Guardian. I live in Altadena, California, where I work as a private investigator at Lynx Insights & Investigations.  

Alongside my video practice, I have also participated in a number of collaborations. I am a co-founder of The Rational Dress Society, a counter-fashion collective, and Arts Research Collective, an experimental art school. On holidays, I make videos with the artist Pau S. Pescador.  

Contact

Maura Brewer Studio, Los Angeles, CA
Email: mqbrewer@gmail.com
Instagram: @maurabrewer