Objectification and Fragmentation

The objectification of the body and its functions is a recurrent theme in my work. I use the body to reflect emotional or psychological fragmentation, borrowing from and reflecting how women and men are often portrayed by and in new technologies, film, TV and advertising. This virtual reality inevitably seeps into the physical and taints how we connect to ourselves and each other on the most fundamental levels.

Am I relevant (platter) and Parts (a room in You Can Have it All), directly explore the idea of body fragmentation. Am I Relevant, with its breasts, buttocks, pelvis, lips and heart randomly arranged on a platter as though offering itself in parts to the viewer... choose which part you want. Focusing on the fragments raises questions as to what is whole in our world today. The viewer cannot locate the centre of this disjointed woman, or to visualize her as a whole. It also gives the viewer the opportunity to mentally put the woman back together again, perhaps in new and novel ways.

You Can Have it All (Dovecote) each room portrays an often disparate part of one woman. She is unified by the structure of the barrel but inside there is much discord and contradiction in the rooms questioning what comprises wholeness? I objectify the sacred, for that is what our bodies are, as a way of revealing the subversive and alienating forms the body and self often take.

The Found Object and the Question of Formalism

Ideas for sculpture and photography are nurtured through a combination of steps. Usually it begins with the random search for an object or image that first arrests and then resonates with me. The search for such objects/images often leads me to many strange and out of the way places, putting me in contact with people and subcultures I would not otherwise meet. I treasure troll with the hopes of discovering a missing link or an answer to a question that has not yet been posed. Once I find an object or image of interest, a metaphoric click occurs and I see the possibilities of what it can become, I see inside it, through it, and inside myself. Yet there is a flaw in this fascination. This process of seeking deeper truths through objects/images is psychically all wrong, as though the material world could ever clarify and explain or fulfill the deeper ethereal. The act of seeking meaning in the material world is what I critique and it is also what I employ to create the very sculpture that challenges this.

Where Do We Go From Here (harnesses) is one such piece that illustrates this. After tooling around an antique fair on a cold English Spring morning I came upon a 200 year old ox harness lying in a heap. Upon finding it, I froze, the energy of the object was palpable and I knew I would use it. I took many deep breaths before cautiously approaching it... if it were to be mine, it needed to speak to me further. It did. I then engaged with the vendor to discuss terms and learned of its history. In this case, I immediately envisioned how I would alter and embellish it due to its obvious inner shape by adding a vagina sculpted out of cow hide, a material I was using in another piece, that would fit snugly in the centre. The tension intrinsic in this object that has been used to harness the power of an ox would now become the home of a large vagina. It looks back from the wall as though saying, "well now what do you think of what's become of me!"

Often I will just collect objects of interest to stockpile and then create a piece with it later in the studio. I find that by juxtaposing unsuspecting materials together, the unexpected emerges, full of tension, mystery, disorientation and discovery. I borrow on the visceral messages that are underlying in an object and use them to weave my tale which is as informative to me personally as it may be to the viewer. What's in there? What's this in me that's reacting to this?

I am generally not focused on formal concerns of physical sculpture. The work is conceptual. Once the idea is developed, any material, used in any way, is fair game. This can sometimes appear irreverent and possibly irritating to those wanting to define the work in formal terms. It might be a challenge to link some of my work together if viewed formally. The thread is conceptual. I hate to be trapped or pinned down. I use materials to express, excite and perplex, not to be constrained by them.

Sexuality and the Law of Attraction

Recently, the work has directly examined the universe that is sexuality; its excesses and deprivations, what is desirable and to whom, who asserts and who receives. I am interested in inverting sexual hierarchies and dynamics. Many of the drawings and photographs explore overt female desire and the conflicts that can arise as a result. As is well known, historically, most of what is desirable has been determined by male preference, through males eyes. In the drawing Wrapped, instead of the vagina as a vessel and the penis as a projectile, the penis envelops the woman, holding her. She is enrapt by its comfort and presence as she wears it like a protective cloak. She is dressed in a gown as its less about sex and more about her desire and exploration of this newfound dynamic. It is a piece that purely celebrates her love of the phallus and the masculine.

Ideally Wrapped will be translated into a large 8' sculpture, classically styled out of white marble, harkening Renaissance favourites like Michelangelo's David or Pieta.

Conflicts are examined between expressing desire whilst remaining desirable. As a female, can both be achieved? Does the natural law of attraction require one to posture and please whilst the other exerts and leads? Is it possible to blur those historically conventional lines? The photographs also explore conflicts between the desire to attract and the need to protect and repulse. The images suggest the body adapts and metamorphosises according to its needs as it sprouts hair, thrones and spikes in unexpected places.

The Body and Its Functions

Our bodies are sacred vessels that house what we need to exist in physical form. They also contain a far more formidable and ambiguous entity, our souls. These brilliant and beautiful creations do what they were evolved to do over the last 1.5 million years. We are finely tuned with an intelligence beyond our comprehension. It is these precious forms that we are entrusted with as living beings and it is these very forms that we debase and often shun through ignorance and misguided choices. I seek to focus on the body to illustrate these often unforgivable manifestations of misunderstanding.

A future piece, Milk Bar, is a fountain whose central figure is an hourglass female figure covered in breasts that ooze and shoot milk into waiting cups that overflow, wasting the precious fluid that will never be consumed. The piece reflects on the overabundance of sexuality, and the commodification of the female breast. The fountain’s excessive use of the prized breast borders on the grotesque. Here, it is also reduced it to its pure function, as a form that provides milk, one which many Western mothers choose to ignore, here its bounty is nourishing no one, and therefore wasted. Mother’s milk is the most primal form of love and indoctrination that exists. There is an extreme intimacy in milk. A female body and all its individually comprised of, merging together to form a unique cocktail of its own, nutrition laden to meet, in harmony, the precise needs of the infant. The milk also contains toxins, based on the mother’s exposure to chemicals and pollution, hormones effected by stress, sexual energy, temperament, etc. What substance could contain a more in depth blueprint of someone than milk that is then fed to the infant child to grow upon? This raises the question of what we are consuming when we drink cow’s milk. Through industrial farming the very basic right of an infant cow to suckle its mother is denied it as it is forced to consume milk from a communal milk bar, cold and plastic where milk from dozens of cows are mixed together. Milk Bar also exposes this denied intimacy and birthright.

Another piece in progress is Treasure Chest. It explores the body as it transits life cycles. The piece shows a hyper realistic 24”post menopausal woman pulling an enormous antique treasure chest or horse cart, full of eggs, the symbol of fertility. Her fertility has long faded from her view but these eggs are her futile hope of her continued worth and more valuable than gold. Of course, the eggs are only sad relics for there is little her body can do with them. She appears like a vagabond, roaming the street, wild eyed in her delusive state of what is possible for her and where she now stands in the social order. By not embracing the body’s natural rhythm of decline she lives in a self-inflicted purgatory as she weighs her desirability and worth by her ability to attract and reproduce, which she no longer can do.

Queen Bee is another future piece that examines the body’s functions. The anthropomorphic hyper realistic queen sits atop a large cluster of eggs as her body mechanically pushes more out. Dripping from the cluster is bees wax which puddles on the floor. The queen has her head drooped to one side and she is in tears as she looks down upon 4 dead drones lying on the ground. They fulfilled their purpose to fertilize her and now they have died. Although she is the all powerful queen, she too is trapped by her position, her biology, to continually lay eggs. She is mourning the death of the drones that inadvertently died because of her and she mourns her own subjugation in the cycle.

The Ego in its Full Glory

Often my works seeks to expose and exaggerate the appetite of the ego. The ego and its will to thrive requires total compliance and it uses its power over the mind to achieve this. The ego wants us to believe in the duality of good and bad, right and wrong, pain and pleasure and material measures for success. Essentially, all human suffering stems from the ego. I've symbolised the ego through the use of thrones, pedestals, golden towers, gaudy frames, vanity tables, mirrors, etc and through these overt displays I can bluntly examine my own entrapment in their facades and false promises.

In my first sculpture as an undergraduate that began my oeuvre, I had a plastic cucumber on a golden pedestal. This simple form represented the phallus being celebrated in a faux grandiose style, while also being ridiculed as it was a cucumber. Words used to describe art were affixed to the surface such as “genre”, “modernity”, “Surrealism”, etc which were to reference the male dominance in art history, both as the artist and the historian.

The Ego in Search of its Death

The ego will never willingly give up its gripping vice over the mind. For one to free oneself of such a menacing tick requires keen and constant consciousness of the mind and body. I have generally been more interested in exposing the ego and its ills rather than portraying peaceful images of what life can be like without it, as I've never experienced that.

In my latest suite of works I am beginning to explore ego’s end. In the Dovecote, one of the rooms is a miniature forest with nothing remarkable about it, just a place that is safe, wholesome and clear. This room, set amongst the others, is of fundamental importance. A forest is a place one can disappear into, a place where the "I" doesn't matter, the ego is gone and one can feel almost without form. It can provide an opportunity to see out of eyes as though they were windows with nothing behind them. The photograph Can You See Me? (Meadow) explores ego's release where the body becomes the meadow, overgrown with flora and fauna. Vanity’s End is another example of a vanity table being swallowed up by moss, so much that it has broken down and is falling over. Here, the natural is taking over this grossly obvious symbol of vanity, for in the natural world, man’s ego has few places to go.

A future sculptural installation that explores ego and its end is Fly Trap. A life-like woman is sitting at a slick fiberglass, ruffled, oversized pale pink vanity table strewn with various perfume bottles and powder puffs. The table is tilting, unsteady, (like my previous vanity table). She is seated on a chair that has snake shaped legs, one of which is a life like snake that is beginning to wrap around her ankle and leg, a golden apple in its mouth. The other ankle is sprouting a small sprig of a tree. The woman is gazing at her reflection in a large, ornate mirror. Her head is a Venus Fly Trap that is automated and is slowly opening and closing continuously

. She is in a constant state of consumption, physically and metaphorically. In her hand, she holds 3 or 4 leashes of various lap dogs (Shitzu, Chihuahua, poodle). The dogs have male human heads. Around her neck is a diamond studded collar and leash that is tied to a fiberglass gold phallic shaped mushroom about 3’ high...maybe higher. There are frogs* jumping on and around the mushroom, with a clear resin pool of water beneath with tadpoles in various stages of evolution. A small bird like a robin is trying to peck away and break her leash.

In the room, bits of earth and moss are oozing out of cracked plaster walls, encroaching upon Ms. Fly trap. There are piles of mossy earth piled in the corners. There is the sound of flies buzzing in the room, that intermittently stop as though a fly has been caught.

Identity Construction and Deconstruction

I’ve had a keen interest in examining how we construct and project our identities because I observe so much of myself as contrived. Throughout my life, I have taken my mind and body, full of its unique complexities, and compared it to a mythic ideal, deemed it as imperfect and sought to correct it with the omnipresent guidance of industries such as beauty, fashion and media. I’ve been expertly guided by my mother’s hand in the art of how to embellish, conceal and reveal who I want to be seen as, often at odds with who I am. I’ve witnessed my ‘self’ so concerned with my projection, that I have forgotten what is true. The faux has replaced the authentic and I’ve spent much of my life searching for external meaning when it lay within me all the time.

In my earlier work, symbols such as gold, jewels, ornate hair pieces, and other objects of adornment are used to reference the shoddy attempts we make to alter and enhance what is already a perfect form. This is the fundamental aim of kitsch. To replace the extraordinary original with something simplistic, unreal and often vulgar. This is best portrayed in Beetle where a 6’ black shiny beetle has blonde hair growing out of its front and backside, as though its original form was not good enough. It declares, “get with the program, everything needs a little adornment, even you bug”.

What lies at the root of adornment, both found in nature, such as a peacock, and that which is man made, is the need to mate and perpetuate. What is beautiful and mate-worthy is open for interpretation but increasingly, an ideal image has come forth which seeps into the consciousness of all and decides who can thrive and who cannot. Women, and now many men, feel the sting of these perceptions and this deeply alters behavior, choices, and threatens a general sense of well being. I seek to expose our struggles between the perpetual building and the shattering of our identities.

Deborah Brown

Careful What You Wish For was an exhibition in October-December, 2016 at Jason Vass, Los Angeles. Essay by Marieke Treilhard

In Careful What You Wish For Deborah Brown explores the body as a site of identity, fragmentation, and desire. In her new installment of work, the artist offers overtly exaggerated expressions of feminine sexuality with playful complicity and co-optation. Her pieces are at once a critique of, and participation in, the cultural colonization of the human body as a locus of desire and revulsion. Often bordering on the grotesque, her imagery hyperbolizes sexuality, the body's abject proximity to death, and the psychologically irreconcilable nature of biologically essentialist demands. For Brown, the body is a site of failure and fulfillment, excess and deprivation, vanity and humiliation: a corporeal manifestation of the ego's psycho-spiritual struggle.

Careful What You Wish For features never before exhibited works in photography, drawing, sculpture, and installation. Conceptually conceived as a shrine to feminine desire, or at least an intentionally kitschy appropriation of male-dominated fetishistic vernaculars, (like those found in trucker culture, porn, and pinup), the exhibition intentionally questions the cultural discomfort associated with feminine expressions and assertions of want. Upon entering the gallery space, a truck door, accompanied by a truck stack, is emblazoned with a flaming vagina, a graphic theme entitled You Might Get Burned, reiterated throughout as a sort of talisman. A symbol, both comedic and subversive in this context, the fetish is excavated as a social and performative agent of meaning. Brown symbolically asserts the vagina as a signifier of danger and refusal rather than of sexual submission, intentionally altering our expectations of its cultural valence. As an added performance component to the exhibition, a vagina shaped piñata will occupy the center of the space as viewers are invited to beat it with a penis shaped bat midway through the opening.

In addition to ten new photographs, the exhibition features several installation vignettes staged throughout the gallery. These sculptural constellations create unexpected encounters and juxtapositions, each differing in tone and affect. In works such as My Man, an eight and a half foot penis hand carved from white cedar, Brown both objectifies and fetishizes the phallus, while playing with coexisting themes of desire and horror, attraction and repulsion. In other works such as Do I Fulfill Your Expectations, a five-foot long leather candy box shaped like a vagina and overflowing with half-eaten, castaway chocolates, the artist considers the consumption, waste, and degradation of the body. In Am I Relevant the female body is literally fragmented into cast aluminum parts and presented for misuse on a tray, a breast here a vagina there. A dissociated mass of body parts, Brown considers the self's dysfunction in an age of ubiquitous compartmentalization and digital dissection.

In Careful What You Wish For, Deborah Brown presents a complex, though playful, body of work in her highly anticipated return to the West Coast. Looking to the nebulous intersections of desire and imperative, lust and regret, self and other, Brown candidly unveils the body as a contentious site of conflicted impulses and unresolved demands.

Deborah Brown is a UK based American artist. She is an MFA graduate of UC Irvine. Brown has been living in the UK for 17 years. Critically acclaimed and widely collected in the US as an emerging artist in the 1990s, Brown has remained active with her practice and has continued to create work while maintaining a studio near Bath. This long-awaited exhibition, the first in the US since 1996, will feature new photographs, sculpture, and installation works created by Brown over the past decade, and marks a reemergence for the artist on the Coast where she began her career.

Toadstools sporting sow snouts; butterflies with human heads; alated, beetle-bodied, Barbie-doll-visaged mannequins: such are the fanciful productions of postmodernist plastician Deborah Brown, a pop surrealist with allegorical aims. The world of Brownian creation is a fusion of earnest artistic purpose and the pixilated fantasia of Bottom’s dream. Beneath the sideshow spectacle of bug husbandry and animal-vegetable grafts lurk hidden depths - close scrutiny makes plain that the cutesy-poo slickness of Brown’s totemic, fetishistic artifacts conceals both moral dimension and cryptic import and belies a complex declension of ingredients…

Brown’s early work routinely consisted of assemblages of toy and doll parts, mannequin heads, costume jewelry, hair extensions and other stock-in-trade of glamour merchants used to form composite creatures wearing mocking masks designed to deride the materialism and commodification suffusing consumer culture and the insatiable vanity and ego-hunger of contemporary society. Now, Brown has introduced a new body of work which continues in the same vein. Formerly concentrating mostly on tabletop objects crafted on a more modest, bijou scale, Brown later began to adopt a number of larger-than-human pieces which project a sense of imposing, official, monument-like heft associated with the sorts of statues and sculptures encountered in a public park.

Unlike marble busts of civic dignitaries mounted on granite pillars, however, Brown’s creations are better described as amalgamations of scavenged limbs and appendages, and of accessories and ornaments cannibalized from the inventory of the local taxidermist, toy shop and wig supply and articulated into a menagerie of the improbable. At the same time as they are anthropomorphized, Brown’s nonesuch cooties – which she calls “hybrids” - are oddly de-humanized. Arrogantly strutting their stuff in an elfin, puckish parade, they are stiff, robotic, strangely neutered, all glassy eyes and ceramic smiles, dumbly staring and coyly grinning in a weird blend of sassiness and vapidity. A playful irony enfolds these poseurs, their pride and pretenses; there is something warped about the mixture of mischief, mockery and menace they exude. But all of this is not with mean or twisted spirit...

The fundamental thrust of the work is to expose the illusion we live within. Brown’s motivation lies in the desire to question the futility of our worldly pursuits, in servitude to our vanity and ego. What interests Brown most is posing the question: how solid is our ground that we think we walk upon and the world that we’ve constructed to help us believe its real? Can we look beyond and see deeper into where our most vital connection rests? The underlying and easily hidden dimension of the work is its direct link to the spiritual. Brown seeks to address the roller coaster we’ve unwittingly, or not, subscribed to ride upon, to reveal its arrogance and cheap thrills as a method to awakening. “If we can peel back the layers of deceit either imposed societally or personally, then what we find is a humble and beautiful love which interconnects us with God and all life”.

"A human being is a part of a whole, called by us 'universe', a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest... a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty." Albert Einstein

Many of Brown’s symbols are insectine in aspect. Insects, because of their perceived lowly, even contemptible status in the hierarchy of species, and because of their lurid and meretricious appearance. They add yet another layer to Brown’s sardonic view by summoning the fact that insects far outnumber humans and may well survive us and replace us.

With this curious visual vocabulary Brown strives to codify a wide range of themes and meanings: the question of identity – of who we are or think we are - and of our place in nature; the primacy of the animal economy and the implications of mutation and hybridization which are the result of man’s tampering with nature; the correlation or schism between nature and artifice; the representation of consumer culture as a surrogate for or simulacrum of nature; the perverting effects of universal commodification; the traditional depiction of monsters – gargoyles, heraldic beasts, and other mythological creatures – in art to symbolize human attributes and evoke human fears and aspirations; the consideration of human life as a series of phases and transitions underscored by the awareness of mortality and the ephemerality of existence. The spontaneous appeal and beguiling charm of Brown’s subtle inventions may suavely distract the viewer from the fable-like narrative underpinning her broader ambition: to posit nothing less than a new, postmodern mythology.

Mushrooms and Mirrors

Among the recurring motifs in Brown’s oeuvre is the mushroom. Legendary since ancient times as a portal to other worlds, the prolific fungus is ubiquitous in all but polar climate zones, and has always figured prominently in the folklore of the fantastic and as a key fixture in the abode of faerie. Besides individual mushrooms featuring incongruous appendages such as pig snouts, goat horns, horsetails, and bird beaks, Brown has fashioned populous groupings of the umbrella-shaped growth. These lumbering, outsized, fibreglass forms loom over the observer in order to place him in proper scale and perspective. Adding to the grotesquerie are gaily painted caps and stalks fused on vintage female mannequin legs in a walking position. According to Brown, “The mushrooms are all peering at their reflections in various mirrors as they 'go about their day’.”

An adjunct installation fashioned by Brown consists of a forest of mirrors where over a hundred assorted vintage mirrors are attached to the tips of real tree branches that meld into outstretched human arms bracketed and protruding from the floors, walls and ceilings so that when the viewer enters the installation, there is no escape from the reflections. As a result, the viewer is swallowed, willing or not, by an almost suffocating envelope of fractured self-portraiture and its by-products - self-examination and auto-confrontation. Gold beetles scattered on the branches and onto some of the mirrors as well as a pathway lined with human hair round out the presentation. The installation explores the fragmented relationship we have with ourselves as well as echoing gross aggrandizements and exaggerations of primal ego. Vanity, narcissism, self-absorption, glorification, and magnification – these are among the many attributes inextricably associated with mirrors. So too are magic, and the notion of transparency as a gateway to other planes. For Brown, the mirror is a medium of shadow and substance whose most salient function is to serve as a reminder of mortality and the ephemerality of existence.

Decoys

Another stock figure in Brown’s image-lexicon is the decoy. One installation under development involves a grouping of dozens of life-like pigeon decoys arranged in typical ground feeding position, picking up pearls and other symbols of wealth and vanity. Display of the fake avians en masse alludes to groupthink and the herd instinct, to population mechanics and mass behavior of all kinds. Any human “pigeons” falling prey to the deception presented by the decoys’ glamorous camouflage and manipulated by the mimicry impulse to join these hapless, ersatz creatures might as well be joining a drove of lemmings headed towards a cliff. Besides illuminating the conundrum of the difficulty of differentiating the natural from the factitious in an era of abstruse science and advanced technology, Brown’s decontextualized decoys call into question man’s stewardship of nature and suggest the existence of furtive, undetectable presences that hint at ulterior realities and undermine accepted limits of the “natural” and the threshold of the known.

Altars and Shrines

Among Brown’s sculptural arrangements suggestive of altars or shrines is Vanity’s End, a larger-than-life-sized, kidney-shaped vanity table supported by legs that resemble those of a newborn foal struggling to balance and about to topple over. Live reindeer moss covers table, mirror and stool as if emerging to devour them from some unknown source. Tiny ladybirds, butterflies and beetles rest on the moss, hinting that nature has reclaimed this quintessential altar of ego and adornment.

In another recent piece, Nest, a human baby in a bird’s nest wriggles helplessly on its back cradled by a circular crib thatched with twigs. Nest speaks of both man’s inseparability from nature and his perennial quest to subjugate it, and begs the question of who’ll gain the upper hand. Against man’s incursions, alterations, and predations, nature fights back through adaptation, albeit sometimes maladaptation. Pan is the deity presiding over this nativity scene, which is also a shrine to the false gods of man’s own making – pride, ambition, greed. Confuting the sacred and the profane, Nest contrasts the innocence of a human neonate with the incipient lures and feints, snares and deceptions which will all too soon rear their heads in the form of those same man-made divinities.

Mutations

Permeating Brown’s corpus is a pervasive sense of error and accident in mankind’s interactions with nature; a sense of perversion, of “unnatural selection”, and of an upturning of the normal order of things. This sense of transgression and aberration is perhaps best expressed by Brown’s fibreglass insect-humanoid and animal-botanical hybrids - denizens of a God-forsaken Galapagos with damage and warpage enough to make Darwin dizzy. Typical of these creatures is The Beetle, a giant stag beetle replica with a shiny black case and luxuriant blonde locks billowing from the sides of its thorax, exemplifying the primitive idea that ingestion results in incorporation of the qualities of the thing ingested. Mushroom with Goat Horns, Ears and Goatee is another of Brown’s fabulous mongrels. As the artist herself puts it, “This mushroom, which is one of four in a series, entices us to enter an alternate reality, in which it is unclear where the mushroom ends and the goat begins, or who is morphing into what.” Combining kitsch, deliberate falsity and undisguised artificiality, the sculptor coyly places her coterie of freakish ambassadors front and center as a wry commentary on the dangers of genetic manipulation and man’s newly discovered Frankensteinian power over the building blocks of life.

Brown’s fantastic cross-fertilizations come across as disarming, loveable monsters, impish, puckish sprites that defy the beholder to say which is the weed and which is the flower. Perpetuating the series of lepidopters, coloeopters, arachnids and ephemerids fabricated from fiberglass are the Butterflies and the Ladybugs. These feature the grossly exaggerated, human-flesh-coloured bodies of insects fitted with simulacra of mandibles, vibrissa, and scales and fused with impeccably coiffed mannequin heads highlighted with gold accents and decorative strings of pearls.

Though they strike one as fugitives of dream, escapees from laboratory experiments gone haywire, or refugees from the Island of Dr. Moreau, the occupants of Brown’s cryptic bestiary somehow work as intended and, however implausibly, exert a paradoxical, sphinxlike power. They might be likened to so many goofy jacks-in-the-box with the gravity of oracular presences.

Brown’s entomological and mycological anomalies and all her other twilight and limbo beings may indeed seem specimens of science gone awry, or evolutionary quirks and vagaries – mishaps which should have remained lost amidst the vortices and helices of evolutionary oblivion, or be consigned outright to perdition but, even so, they represent a serious anthropological slant on ego versus ecosystem.

Infestations

The effect is startling and disorienting, like being about to take a bite from a purple lollipop until you see the face of Rasputin embossed on its flesh, or lifting to your lips a teacup from which you are about to sip until you see it is covered in fur.

In Meadow, the viewer is confronted by a female torso entirely assimilated by moss and insects. Insects mock accepted notions of beauty and identity and here, as with Brown’s ironic baby in a bird’s nest, the construction is a simile for the ascendancy of nature over man, or vice versa.

Insect invasion is applied differently in Bees, where a v-shaped cluster of the buzzing honey-vintners forms a perfect pubic wig for the mons veneris of a shapely female pelvis. Originating from hidden hives ordinarily segregated from civilization’s precincts, bees are nevertheless always there, ever at the ready to swarm, to engulf, to envelop, like a wild overgrowth of jungle vines ready to swallow up a Mayan temple. Just as a blanket of moss enfolding a human body illustrates the idea of nature reclaiming its own, so too does this handful of bees imply not only natural processes of dissolution, disintegration, and decay, but intimates a cosmic perspective carrying the cognizance that the humblest of creatures can eclipse the mightiest and proudest works of man, and resolve them again to the elements.

Humans and the environments they inhabit are engaged in a never-ending battle for supremacy and the spirit of contest or cooperation – parasitism or symbiosis – is constantly subject to subversion. Brown manages to package her meditations on this subject in a quaint, elfin-pagan-animist sensibility; at once saucy, shocking, raffish, and disconcerting, the insolence of Brown’s approach does not detract from such serious ancillary concerns as her investigation of the interpenetration of nature and ulterior realms.

Beneath the starry-eyed impudence and seeming frivolity of Brown’s anthropomorphized creations lies a wicked, cerebral satire. By mimicking seductive conventions in contemporary consumer culture, she draws in the viewer and simulates a new natural order. While maintaining an ongoing dialogue about the relationship between art and nature, and between art and artifice, Brown’s aesthetic is ultimately a metaphysical exercise, inasmuch as it represents an investigation of our constructed reality. Brown counterpoises provocative exponents in a symbolic language simultaneously emblematic and enigmatic. The question is: are the messages they spell out cautionary fantasies or fateful premonitions?

B. R. Gilbert