Of the Dense and Porous: More Holes by Linda Leslie Brown

Linda Leslie Brown, Porous, 2015, mixed media.

We are very pleased to welcome a guest writer, Heather Davis, to our blog, for her essay about Linda Leslie Brown‘s exhibition, More Holes. If you’re around this holiday weekend, stop by the gallery to see the exhibition before it closes this Sunday, May 29. 

The forms emerge from and with the earth. Various materials—plastic, ceramic, wood, metal—are pressed and held together in strange, humorous, bodily shapes. Almost recognizable items emerge from the matrix, as odd characters that seem to have been compressed through the pressures of time and weight, emerging as if from the distant future. The detritus of consumer culture is here reworked to comment on its archaeological status to come. Linda Brown’s series More Holes evocatively produces these future fossils, implicitly asking, “What are we leaving behind? What will remain as our material legacy?”

Installation view, More Holes, Kingston Gallery, May 2016, photo by Ann Wessman.

“Materials teach you things” Brown asserts. Working with discarded materials, culled from recycling bins and objects she finds on the ground, provokes questions not only about their shape, size, weight and structure, but about their lives, past and future. In rendering the objects unrecognizable, Brown creates abstract remnants of a society hell-bent on technological progress, heedless of the warnings that are all around us.

Despite the beauty of their forms and the way that they seem to beg to be touched, retracing the movements of Brown’s hand as she worked with the materials, there is something rather banal and sad in the waste. Immune to the processes of decomposition and cycles of transformation that govern our bodies and other organic matter, these objects remain stubbornly inert as if found in some future landfill: broken, cast aside, and then petrified. The objects begin to write our era into the geology of the earth.

Linda Leslie Brown, All Natural, 2015, mixed media. 

The brilliance of Brown’s artistic rendering is in provoking reflection on the meaning of all these objects, all this waste, while still providing holes. The porousness of the work suggests a future already in the process of being reworked. The holes refute ideas of masterful progression, instead creating a sense of the unfinished, while at the same time providing more surface and more entryways into the work. The sculptures look as if animals have already made a home in them, moving through the dense layers of plastic and metal and ceramic. Things that used to have a definitive form, that once had commercial value, appear instead to have become the dwellings of burrowing creatures and waste-consuming bacteria.

Brown’s work collapses the distinction between “nature” and “culture,” and her artworks become an offering that seem to have emerged from the future, eroded and weathered, complete with the markings of many other critters. The porosity of the works reminds us to be humble in the face of our technological advances and the negative sublime of ecological crisis. There is always a way through; there are always more holes.

Linda Leslie Brown, Hermit Crab, 2015, mixed media. 

Heather Davis is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for the Arts and Humanities at the Pennsylvania State University where she researches the ethology of plastic and its links to petrocapitalism. She is the editor of Art in the Anthropocene: Encounters Among Aesthetics, Politics, Environments and Epistemologies (Open Humanities Press, 2015) and Desire/Change: Contemporary Feminist Art in Canada (MAWA/McGill-Queen’s UP, forthcoming 2017). Her writing can be found at heathermdavis.com.

Kingston Members Represent at National Prize Show!

Conny Gölz-Schmitt, Without Flag, 2016, vintage book parts

Kingston Gallery member artists Susan Alport, Kathleen Gerdon Archer, Susan Greer Emmerson, and Conny Gölz-Schmitt were among 60 artists selected for the 15th National Prize Show at the Cambridge Art Association, juried by Paul C. Ha, Director of the MIT List Visual Arts Center.  The exhibition dates are May 19 to June 23, 2016.

Susan Greer Emmerson, Mind Field, 2015, ink of cut paper, approx 51 x 38 inches

Conny Gölz-Schmitt received the Best Multi Media Prize for her sculptural collage, Without Flag. She is one of six people in the exhibition to receive a prize, we are proud to report. This June, Gölz-Schmitt will show a new series of mixed media works that incorporate silk painting and collage in the Members’ Gallery in a solo exhibition, Reconsidered. You can read about her previous exhibition at Kingston, Uncovered, in a previous blog post.

Alport and Archer recently had solo exhibitions in Kingston’s Members’ Gallery (in April and March, respectively). Alport’s recent Kingston Gallery exhibition, Juxtaposed, was enigmatic and poetic. The artist combined repurposed images and materials into collages and sculptures that responded to the gallery space, opening up possibilities for unique aesthetic responses and introducing narrative possibilities. In 2015, she exhibited work at Maud Morgan Arts in Cambridge, MA. You can read about Archer’s previous Kingston exhibitions, including the group exhibition All Natural, curated by Al Miner, here and here. Emmerson is also showing in a three-person exhibition at NYCH Gallery in Chicago, IL this month, and she had a solo exhibition at Kingston Gallery in May 2015.

Susan Alport, There for the Taking, 2014, 35 mm print on architect’s paper

About Cambridge Art Association’s 15th National Prize Show

Conceived in the late 1990s, the Cambridge Art Association’s National Prize Show has featured work by over 1,500 contemporary American artists in 14 exhibitions.

Kathleen Gerdon Archer, Light Changes, 2015, Polypropylene print on Sintra under plexiglas

Artists and entrants represent every US state – including Alaska and Hawaii – and a full range of artistic mediums. In its history, the National Prize Show has awarded over $65,000 in cash prizes to living American artists, and has been featured in numerous publications, including the Boston Globe and Art New England.

About the juror, Paul C. Ha

Paul C. Ha is currently the Director of the List Visual Arts Center, the contemporary art museum at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Known for presenting experimental and timely exhibitions, the List also oversees MIT’s percent for art program, which has created one the outstanding national collections of public art. In 2014 Ha was chosen to be commissioner of the U.S. Pavilion for the La Biennale di Venezia 56th International Art Exhibition. Ha and co-curator Ute Meta Bauer proposed artist Joan Jonas, a pioneer of performance and time based art.