Deborah Brown

Statement

Deborah Brown’s paintings reflect the industrial landscape of car salvage lots and scrap metal yards in the Bushwick neighborhood where she has worked since 2006.  The new work leaves behind the narrative space of objective reality for the realm of abstraction and anthropomorphism.  The paintings depict failed industrial structures in a sci-fi world of garish colors and uncertain horizons.  Ziggurats and pods contain the twisted hulks of cars and other unidentified debris.  Tubes and trestles lurch at precarious angles that resemble the torqued construction cranes and sea-side amusement rides twisted by Super Storm Sandy.  Other works, the “Tetes,” depict the human head as a container for the organic, the kinetic, and the chaotic, a representation of consciousness and the divided nature of identity.  The artist uses vigorous additive and subtractive paint application, revealing the struggle of the painting’s history.  What emerges is a hybrid of the mechanical and the organic—a metaphor for contemporary human reality.