Artist(s): Lex Brown
Date: January 17, 2019-February 23, 2019
Lex Brown’s first solo institutional exhibition was informed by her fascination with television and manipulative editing that conflates personhood and experience into an auto-fictional brand, a phenomenon that now pervades all forms of screen-mediated life. In the current moment, our familiarity with those tropes is now firmly integrated with the unshakeable sense of derealization experienced in a post-fact America, in which marketing and scrolling trump the processing of felt reality. As AI and big data further alter our interactions in the physical world, and news everyday suggests climate change will create a tipping point for humanity—towards a physically unlivable world for those without privilege—many of us continue to go about life, our “fight or flight” response nulled by a sea of information.
At first glance, the installation existed in an almost entirely silent and unseen state; yet upon detecting viewers’ presences, can erupt into sensory overload. Four large-scale color field drawings—in which grids of color gradients obscure text—sit dormant as scripts for either human or computer to read. Animal Static (2019) is a three–channel video triggered by motion-sensors which shift from character-based narrative towards various modes of mediation, at moments becoming increasingly disorienting as the viewer approaches the video.
Brown organizes levels of experience around a growing dissociation from any sense of lived, embodied reality, playing on the way our culture of ever-recycled images sees personal stories captured, monetized, and re-circulated ad infinitum. As a remedy to such feelings of disconnect, the characters in this world are played by Brown’s friends who, by slipping in and out of their roles as they play out comedic and absurd storylines, highlight the on-set camaraderie between cast and director. Brown’s directing style draws upon several years of training in Clown, a performance style that emphasizes improvisation and play.
On February 21 and February 22, 2019, Brown performed a version of her one-woman operetta Focacciatown. Taking place in a medieval future and set in a trendy fast casual bakery on military base, this melodrama collapses large-scale political issues like national defense, border control, with lifestyle branding, food trends, and the nuclear family.
This exhibition was organized by Lumi Tan.
Lex Brown: Animal Static is made possible with commissioning support from Marta Heflin Foundation; annual grants from Lambent Foundation Fund of Tides Foundation, Joseph and Joan Cullman Foundation for the Arts, and The Cowles Charitable Trust; and in part by public funds from New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council and New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.
RELATED
Lex Brown
Foccaciatown:Reloaded
On Screen
Lex Brown and Miguel Gutierrez
Across the Table
On Screen
Lafawndah and Qualeasha Wood
Across the Table
On Screen