Act I: Waiting Room (detail), 2017
Charcoal drawing, beta fish, candy bowl, succulent, sign-in book, bell and pen.
dimensions variable
Waiting Room, 2017
Category: DRAWING AND PAINTING
Transpacific, 2012
Transpacific (a line drawn from Texas to Japan), 2012
194 #2 pencils, paper, steel, pencil sharpeners
40″w x 72″h
Exhibited in Sons and Daughters of the Sun and Star I, Fort Worth Contemporary Arts, Fort Worth, TX, 2012
Catalog: Sons and Daughters of the Sun and Star (PDF). See also Damemoto, made for the Hiroshima half of the exchange.
Made for an exchange between Texas Christian University and Hiroshima City University, Transpacific is one continuous line drawn with 194 pencils on a single sheet of paper. By the old claim that a pencil can draw a line 35 miles long, together they hold about 6,790 miles of graphite, the distance from Fort Worth to Hiroshima.
The word Chorioactis is masked out and left blank. It is the Latin name of a rare mushroom, the Devil’s Cigar or Texas Star in the United States and kirinomitake in Japan, that grows only in a few isolated places in Texas and Japan. The drawing’s repeated marks echo its spores drifting between the two, carried by wind and chance. The piece is shown with everything left from the 194 pencils: broken tips, shavings, and stubs sharpened down as far as they would go. In her essay for the exhibition catalog, critic Lucia Simek pointed to Transpacific as a record of the exchange itself, the artists’ actual journey between the two cities rendered in graphite.
Impala Eardrums
As Impala Murder, 2008
Salt water and hydrogen peroxide on car door
39.5″ x 37″
As Impala Murder is the cover art for Impala Eardrums: A Radium Sampler, a 2008 compilation from Table of the Elements’ Radium label. Both titles are anagrams of “A Radium Sampler.” Brown was also the art director, graphic designer and photographer for the release.
Brown found a Chevy Impala door in a Long Island junkyard and sanded it down to bare metal. He attached a stencil of a photograph to the door and sprayed it with a mix of salt water and hydrogen peroxide to cause it to rust. Once it dried, he removed the stencil, and the image was left behind formed in rust. Brown talks about the piece in this interview with KERA.
It was one of several projects Brown created through his graphic design work for the label, where several albums came with their own creative project. See also Donkey Punch and Side A.
Beastly Words, 2007
Road Agent, Dallas, TX • 09.07
Beastly Words explores the fundamental flaw of language as an expression of our deepest selves, and the contradictions of language as image. Pained, repetitive words and phrases are subdued and channeled into new forms, given life as watery zebras, muscular tigers, an anthropomorphized WWII fighter plane, and breathless track runners.
Brown first creates film negatives from mysterious scrawlings recovered from a university library trash can—the aching and robotic exercises of an unknown author. Brown’s subsequent use of older photographic techniques to recontextualize the images, through Cyanotype and Van Dyke processes, naturally limits his palette to a calming range of organic browns and blues, fading or deepening depending on exposure to light. He imposes a more natural and visceral world on the underlying fumbling language, as well as foiling the hyper-Photoshopped slickness of our mass-media world.
Three Trees, 2012
Three Trees, 2012
Unique digital prints
13″ x 17″
In Three Trees, the computer monitor becomes a camera lucida. Working from photographs, Brown redraws each tree by hand on screen, identifying every leaf while staying true to the original image.
The finished digital drawings are printed onto torn sketchbook paper. The ragged edges make each print a unique object, yet the image itself is infinitely reproducible. Like the cliché verre, the 19th-century process of printing hand-drawn glass plates on photographic paper, the work asks how an art object is valued: what is a physical print worth compared to the digital information that defines it?
The series is part of Brown’s ongoing fusion of drawing and painting with photography, a body of digitally crafted work that reevaluates tools and techniques from photographic history.
Drawing Stairs, 2016–present
Drawing Stairs (1-9), ongoing
Graphite / ink on paper
Donkey Punch, 2008
Donkey Punch, 2008
Mixed media on chalkboard
48″ x 72″
Donkey Punch is the album cover for Megafaun’s Bury the Square, released in 2008 on the experimental label Table of the Elements. Brown drew the image in mixed media on a chalkboard and then photographed it for the cover. He was also the art director and graphic designer for the release. Read the album’s review on Pitchfork.
The drawing is an illustrated picture of the music industry and works as a cautionary tale about the life of a touring musician. The donkey stands in for the nomadic life of the road: a tour bus loaded with everything you own. Snakes, bats and con men surround it, figures that show one face but turn out to have two. The traveler keeps moving forward anyway and finds a way through them. The music itself is the real weapon, but sometimes it needs backup: help from those who build the path. That’s the shotgun, marked “This Machine Kills Fascists,” the slogan Woody Guthrie wrote on his guitar.
Donkey Punch was one of several projects Brown made through his design work for the label, where several albums came with their own creative project. See also Impala Eardrums and Side A.
Fairytale of New York, 2008
Fairytale of New York
2008
paint, thread, marker, ink
48″ x 36″
Love’s Last Shift, 2005
Love’s Last Shift, 2005
Mixed media on canvas
38″ x 36″
Take Less Than You Need, 2002
Take Less Than You Need, 2002
Mixed media on canvas
43″ x 56″
