"Becky Brown’s paintings in Pleasure Reading reposition passwords, catchphrases, complaints, and corporate blather in a sly and dexterous aesthetic lineage, embossing and memorializing the chatter, making it matter."
— Neil Fauerso
Today, more text circulates between more people than ever before; yet meaning and authenticity are increasingly in question. Who is speaking? Can language be trusted? Is there a human being behind the words we see on our screens? This exhibition considers how communication might reclaim humanity, freedom and pleasure—by bringing language off the screen and back to physical forms. Becky Brown explores technology’s vast impacts by adapting text from social media, news, advertising and other online sources. As an endless scroll of language numbs our minds and senses, she uses repetition to test boundaries between meaning and nonsense. Hand-painted lettering allows poetic nuance a way back in, resisting the standardization of Word documents and text messages, and drawing attention
to the loss of individuality in on-screen expression.
Large-scale works on paper take the form of once commonplace objects that are now increasingly replaced by digital substitutes: a giant, yellow-lined legal pad lists imaginary passwords, and an outsized journal overflows with text from the online surveys flooding our inboxes. It suggests that even private consciousness has been breached by what theorist Jonathan Crary calls “the internet complex.” These exaggerated blow-ups of familiar objects offer glitches in the ever-accelerating movement of technology. With layered paint, collage and trompe l’oeil effects, they ask us to slow down and reconsider the medium of our messages, nurturing a less digital, more physical future. Brown’s small-scale works often combine bright color and intricate pattern with single words or short
phrases whose meanings have mutated with online circulation, like “creator,” “contactless” and “brain rot.”
Here, the cognitive process of reading is entwined with sensory perception. Using improvisational abstraction, the artist challenges the attention economy with the openness and pleasure of imagination.
Late night doomscrolling, misunderstood texts, password resets and online surveys can leave us ill-informed and disconnected. Brown’s paintings act as visual interference, disrupting the routines of online life by celebrating material presence, intuition and the human touch.
-
Becky Brown is a painter and visual artist born and raised in Manhattan, currently living in Buffalo, NY. She received her BA from Brown University, her MFA from Hunter College and is an Assistant Professor at SUNY University at Buffalo. Solo and two-person exhibitions include PS122 Gallery (NYC), Arts+Leisure Gallery (NYC), the Handwerker Gallery (Ithaca, NY), Raft of Sanity (Buffalo, NY) and Fort Gondo (St. Louis, MO). Group exhibitions include The Drawing Center, Queens Museum, Freight+Volume Gallery, Pratt Manhattan Gallery and A.I.R. Gallery (all NYC); Last Projects (Los Angeles); Buffalo Institute of Contemporary Art and Hallwalls (Buffalo, NY), CICA Museum (Gyeonggi-do, Korea) and Religare Arts Initiative (Delhi, India). She has been an artist-in-residence at MacDowell, Yaddo, Millay, Edward Albee and Saltonstall Foundations, among others. Her installation No, said the Fruit Bowl, in the kitchen of an abandoned home on Governors Island, was described in the New York Times as “machines vomiting as if in a bulimic’s nightmare.” She has received grant funding from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts and Bronx Council on the Arts. Her work has been written about in the New York Times, the New York Observer, Hyperallergic, Two Coats of Paint and Art Spiel, among others. Her critical writing has been published in Art in America and The Brooklyn Rail.