Carol K. Brown "Passersby & Home Décor"
Nohra Haime Gallery
This event has ended.
Based on photographs she takes of people on the streets, Carol K. Brown’s Passersby are paintings of isolated homeless people that create a tension between the rawness of the subject matter and the beauty of the painting. Are the Passersby the transient subjects depicted in the paintings, or are they us, the viewers?
Brown had been working on the Passersby series when a collector, after buying one of the paintings, commented that he enjoyed living in a neighborhood where everyone “looks the way I do.” There is a fascinating irony that someone would spend money on a painting depicting a person he would go to extremes to avoid in real life. The realization of this attitude, perhaps not an uncommon tendency, was the impetus for the related series of prints entitled Home Décor. Brown sees them as an expression of the tension she felt as a child growing up in an elegant New Orleans home, a city where the lines between beauty and poverty were often blurred. While these images could be read as a scathing social critique, the “not in my neighborhood” impulse is rampant in all economic strata. The edginess of the images is heightened by the obvious tenderness she feels for her subjects.
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Schedule
from March 26, 2008 to April 26, 2008