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?”
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.
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.