15,540 Miles, 2002
School desks, 444 No. 2 pencils, sawdust, pencil shavings, chalkboard, cyanotype on carpet
Variable dimensions

Exhibited at Conduit Gallery, Dallas, TX, 2002. This was Brown’s first commercial gallery exhibition.

Two school desks sat in the middle of the room. One was embedded with 444 No. 2 pencils. A single No. 2 pencil can, in theory, draw a line about 35 miles long, so together the 444 pencils could draw a line 15,540 miles long. The second desk sat beside it, buried in sawdust and pencil shavings. On the wall facing the desks hung a classroom chalkboard with a world map drawn on it, and the 15,540-mile line was plotted across the map, starting in Dallas and heading east.

The walls to the left and right held 64 portraits, 32 on each side, of Brown’s classmates from his elementary school yearbooks. For each portrait he cut a stencil and sprayed cyanotype photo emulsion onto a piece of carpet. The portraits were hung unexposed and kept under a black tarp until the opening reception. That night the tarp came off, and over the course of the evening the faces slowly appeared on the carpet as the emulsion reacted to the light.

The installation is about fear and pressure and the two ways people respond to them. Fear can push you to move, or its weight can hold you in place. Some people adapt and excel; others get buried.