29/04/2009-29/05/2009: Jacqueline Brown
STYX Project Space is pleased to present the first German solo exhibition of Jacqueline Brown.
In her drawings, installations, videos, and sculptures, Brown turns an inquisitive eye on nature and its strange formations. Rather than relying on the clichés of German or English Romanticism in grasping for some lofty implications of truth within the sublime, Brown largely focuses her concerns on the manipulation of natural phenomena by humans for normative purposes that often seem comical or simply bizarre upon closer inspection.
Cultivating material from the English countryside, where Brown spent her childhood, the artist's interest in hunting as sport led to the creation of 38 1/2 Couple, a video work that documents the "hidden lives" of a clan of hounds as they await the next hunt. The presence of the camera, of course - and the artist behind it - imbues the hounds with a self-consciousness and curiosity they would otherwise lack, while the supplemental pieces - a video listing each of the dogs' names and an audio interview with their trainer - further situates these hounds' lives as an extension of a larger human project.
Brown's training as a sculptor emerges at the forefront of her large drawings of conifer trees. The artist takes photographs in the forest of a seemingly infinite hatch of foliage, then "edits" her footage - effectively sculpting the material - into peculiar shapes that are then drawn on paper in painstakingly exquisite detail. Even here, seemingly undisturbed nature is not allowed to rest; rather, it is the artist herself who intervenes, mimicking an act of God through her re-structuring of flora.
More recently, Brown has taken inspiration from the urban environs of her new home, Berlin. Walking the streets shortly after the Christmas holiday, Brown became fascinated by the discarded Christmas trees laid out on the streets awaiting rubbish collection. The trees are forgotten while their owners return to playing online casino and watching the television. In their state of abandonment, Brown became curious as to the human lives they temporarily enriched, even going so far as to scribbling the street address of each one she "discovered" in her diary. At STYX Project Space, Brown will premiere this new series of miniature drawings, which, again, implies a poignant instrumental usage on the human side of the equation.
Through her sculptures, video, and extensive drawings, Brown's voyage as an artist has been spurred on by an inquisitive curiosity as to the ways in which we interact with the world we have inherited. The real accomplishment of Jacqueline Brown's "New Naturalism", though, may be the artist's anti-programmatic approach towards her subjects - a process that isolates and substantiates fragments taken from a confused and often violent world.
Jacqueline Brown (*1982, Oxford, UK) studied at the Royal College of Art in London (MA Sculpture, 2007) and the Winchester School of Art in Hampshire (BA Hons Fine Art Sculpture, 2004). Her work has been exhibited throughout the UK and abroad. In 2007, she was short-listed for the Bloomberg New Contemporaries. That year, she also took first prize for short film at the Totnes Short Film Festival. Brown currently lives and works in Berlin.
Opening Reception: 29 April 2009, 7-10 pm
Closing Reception: 29 May 2009, 7-10 pm
Open daily 2-3 pm and by appointment.