Spider Webs, 2017
Cyanotype on canvas
16.5″w x 20”h

Exhibited in Image for Concept: Indirect Representation in Photography, Southeast Museum of Photography, Daytona State College, Daytona Beach, FL, 2019, and The Hand Art Center, Stetson University, DeLand, FL, 2020

In Spider Webs, the computer monitor becomes a camera lucida. Working from photographs, Brown redraws each web by hand on screen, recognizing every thread while staying true to the original image.

The digital drawings are then printed as cyanotypes on canvas. The frayed edges of the canvas make each piece unique, 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 object worth compared to the digital information that defines it?

Spider Webs was made in 2017 during the North Set Residency in Houston, organized by Bea Ying Projects in a vacant commercial building that had once been a title loan office. In that setting the webs took on another meaning: they reference how title loan and other short-term lending companies can trap people in cycles of debt that are hard to escape, all in the pursuit of paradise, or the American Dream. The series was made alongside Title Loan, a group of cyanotypes on canvas from the same residency.

The series grows out of Brown’s larger interest in the blurring line between our physical and digital surroundings. Across installation, sculpture, photography and video, his work looks at how technology shapes our decisions, both enhancing and disrupting our sense of independence, and invites viewers to weigh its potential against its pitfalls and its effect on cultural and individual identity.

The web returns as a subject in UUUUUU (2023), a spiderweb hand-formed from copper wire stripped from internet cable.