Matchbooks, 2010
Digital prints from film scans
Dimensions variable

Matchbooks is a series of miniature sculptures made from ordinary paper matchbooks, photographed on film and printed at a large scale. Bent, folded, and torn, the matches and covers become small creatures with many legs, suggesting sea life, crustaceans, or insects. Enlarged in the photographs, objects that fit in the palm of a hand take on a gigantic, living presence.

The series is an exercise in taking a banal, everyday object and recontextualizing it as something whimsical or otherworldly. Like much of Brown’s work, it asks viewers to adjust their perspective and let go of their assumptions about what they are looking at.

The pieces also lend themselves to a formal reading of shape, form, color, and composition. Brown works with the graphics already printed on each matchbook, so every sculpture becomes a kind of three-dimensional collage, which the photograph then flattens back into two dimensions.

A related sequence follows the matches from material to application. Burned matches still standing in their matchbook read like a bouquet of flowers or long grass bending in the wind. The same burnt matches are then crushed into a pile of ash, and finally that ash is dragged across a page the way charcoal is used to make a drawing.

The sequence ties directly to Brown’s piece Several Ways to Start a Fire, which considers how the discovery and control of fire shaped human evolution and the development of art, writing, storytelling, and even language.