Heather Brown
Bedfellows
October 10th – November 1st, 2015
Opening reception on Oct. 10th from 7-10 pm
Monte Vista Projects is pleased to present Heather Brown's solo exhibition, Bedfellows. This will be the first public exhibition to show the artist's abstract oil paintings and figurative drawings together. In Brown's pen and ink drawings, figure drawing runs free and wild. Contour becomes form as lines shift from the description of an edge to the internal delineation of a shape. Schematic figures caress, climb, crawl, and strut and across the picture plane. Overlapping bodies ambiguously depict either sexual entwining, a collision of personalities, or a divided subject’s various selves. Brown’s distinctive approach to line has distant precedent in the improvisations of Surrealist practice, the early fashion drawings of Andy Warhol, and the wobbly satires of Saul Steinberg, but her tangled, loopy vision is entirely her own. Brown’s oil on canvas paintings in the exhibition conjure muddy labyrinths of portals, threshholds, and blocked passageways. The compositions and paint application draw from the language of modernism, but instead of a purity of form, the viewer is offered a hardscrabble accumulation of brush stokes seen through a thicket of rubbings, scrapings, and reversals. Brown’s mazes of undo and redo perform an anarchical reckoning with the legacy of heroic geometric abstraction. Taken together, these two formally distinct threads of Brown’s practice enter a complex dialog, informing each other and also informing on each other.
Heather Brownʼs solo exhibitions include Ruins; Carter & Citizen, Los Angeles, Thank You For Your Childhood; Parker Jones, Los Angeles, Drawings; Parker Jones, Los Angeles, and Heather Brown: New Paintings; Black Dragon Society, Los Angeles. Her work has been seen in group exhibitions at several other Los Angeles venues including Weekend, Five Thirty Three, Black Dragon Society, Honor Fraser Gallery, and Angles Gallery. She received an MFA from UCLA and a BA from UCSB. She lives and works in Los Angeles.
Check out her review:
http://contemporaryartreview.la/heather-brownat-monte-vista-projects/