NYNY2020

Press Release

NYNY2020

November 19 - December 19, 2020

One of my favorite work projects has always been demo. It’s now a romantic cliché of art school that you also have to learn how to drywall. But it goes without saying that if you shittily put up drywall, you will also inevitably have to take it down. I have done this (rotation) exactly once during my twenty-year stint of living in New York City. Anyway, few things are more animalistically enjoyable than recklessly slamming a sledgehammer into something you’ve built. With no professional knowledge of how to destroy, it comes very naturally.

Routines are the opposite of destruction, and reality consists mostly of these. A morning routine: snoozing, brushing, caffeinating, beautifying, updating, affirming, denying, the armor you put on to face the day. The robotic, but now fading, maze-memory of timing, transfers, and cuts across the New York City transit system. Weekly, monthly, annual routines like stopping in, popping by, dining out, piling up, ordering in, throwing down, going to see, rolling the dice, scrolling past, liking, hating: some are done, while others just push into the future.

Ritual-routine paths get worn in, like a turfed lawn. Eventually you notice: it’s all in the cards, and if you want the game to change, you have to play it differently.

— Melissa Brown, 2020

Derek Eller Gallery is pleased to present NYNY2020, an exhibition of new paintings by Melissa Brown. In this series, Brown uses her daily experiences, routines, and movements in and around New York City over the past year as portals into perceptual shifts and distortions caused by collisions between imagined, observed, and digital realities. To represent these perceptual shifts and their various temporal registers, Brown continues her exploration of collaged, disparate painting techniques: screen-printed digital photography, stencil, airbrush, and impasto oil paint mingle on flat-television-like surfaces (dibond). Juxtaposing straightforward images with those captured in mirrors and reflections, as well as natural light with the glare of a computer screen or phone, Brown’s compositions transform familiar landscapes, interiors, and still lives into surreal tableaus that illuminate the obvious yet invisible symbolic structures in ordinary existence.

This emphasis on how the mundane can be extraordinary or symbolic will also be made manifest through an ongoing gallery performance by the artist. In an effort to create impromptu, dynamic, socially-distant synergies between random groups of gallery viewers, Brown will offer Bagomancy readings throughout the run of the exhibition. Bagomancy, a divination technique invented by the artist, interprets symbolic meaning from objects carried in one’s bag or on one’s person.

Press:

Arts Magazine, Rob Colvin