Heather Brown Drawings Oct 29 - Dec 6, 2009

HEATHER BROWN, DRAWINGS

PARKER JONES is proud to announce Drawings, the first solo presentation of the works on paper of Heather Brown. The opening reception will be held on Thursday, October 29, from 7 to 9 pm., and the exhibition will run thru December 5.

For Brown, who also makes paintings, drawing is where her practice begins. Marked by decisive and expressive gestures and a tactile approach that can involve cutting, collage, or folding the paper, Brown’s drawings remark—often obliquely—on the devices of drawing by revealing or collapsing formal idioms in a sometimes awkward, humorous or brutal fashion. Her idiosyncratic and experimental process lays bare the labor as revisions accumulate on the surface.

Brown’s figurative drawings are intimately concerned with their subjects and are the source material for the work on canvas. Narratives about the consequentiality of relationships—social, sexual and psychological—are explored through formal and material metaphor. References range from the external—as in the An Affair To Remember series—to the internal—as with the introspective and analytical nude portraits. In all, however, multiple interpretations are sustained to engage the viewer’s collective knowledge and fantasies.

Alongside the thirteen new drawings, the artist is presenting two new paintings. Brown’s paintings—primarily what she’s exhibited since receiving her MFA in painting from UCLA in 2002—seamlessly move from portraiture to pattern paintings to geometric abstractions that often contain echoes of landscapes or architecture. For this exhibition, to compliment the drawings and enrich the conversation between the two parts of her practice, Brown has selected two classical reclining nudes to exhibit. Inspired by the image of the magician’s assistant—who is sawed in half before a crowd for the theater of suspended disbelief, the subject of this genre is not the subject at all, but in fact a distraction for the eye while a slight of hand creates an illusion. In Brown’s versions, however, the viewer is made aware of the artifice entwined with the image and the object.

Born in Berkeley, California, the artist lives and works in Los Angeles. This will be her third solo show.