michaela pilar brown

a solo exhibition

GOODALL GALLERY | COLUMBIA COLLEGE | 2012

Organized by Jackie Adams, Coordinator, Goodall Gallery

michaela pilar brown

Essay by Frank Martin

ichaela Pilar Brown combines painting, sculpture and performance to address the traumatic transitions of cultural displacement and alienation generated from the difficulties imposed upon descendants of Americas formerly enslaved population pertaining to negotiations required for structuring a new, feasible and authentic American identity. By interrogating assumptions about concepts of home,and its association with comfort, safety and consideration of tangible and intangible sources of self-affirmation, Brown indicates the peculiar character figure 1 of the experiences of Americans of African descent within the larger American cultural matrix, and also visually brings to the fore an important component of our shared human experiences in establishing a sense of a self. In the photograph titled Family Troubles (fig. 1) an inverted seated indigo-blue-faced figure holds a miniature house implying the tangible spirit of family that may emanate from a particular structure recognized as a home. Brown uses the chair as a symbol of mundane domesticity: a chair being among the most mundane of household objects, a perfect allusion to the interiority of home experience and the idea of stability associated with place. In the magical world of spirits we are given to understand by this image that the ordinary rules of physical forces are inapplicable. Intelligible things and perceptible things need not behave in similar ways. She uses the irrational inversion of what we would see in this world to evoke, with consummate visual poetry, what we could never actually see in another kind of reality, but a sense of the intangibles that constitute our consciousness, to some extent both inherited by the accidents of ancestry, and shaped by the action of our unique intelligence-in-the-moment, our claim to personal identity. We are watched by spirits, whether we acknowledge their presences or not.

Untitled (fig. 2) This image of an ancestral presence in the form of a self-portrait of the aritst representing her own progenitors looking toward her own proper left side indicating an awareness of the past, looking backward considering what was. The complementary image of the artist-as-ancestral spirit completes the time based theme, here looking to the right, signifying looking toward the future as part of the personal iconography of the artist. The

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structure on the figures shoulder implies the idea of a chip on the shoulder, an attitude based in what is inherited, a legacy and a burden. The presence of the figure serves as a guardian against the threat of external definition in an effort for American families to recover from the physical trauma of enslavement fearful of exposure because of the sexualized commodification of the black female body.

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Blueprints (fig. 3, 4) Blue is a color often associated with spirituality in popular consciousness and is a part of the legacy of South Carolinas enslavement culture in which descendants of the Sea Island Gullah speakers who moved inland continue to use blue paint as an apotropaic spiritual force, used to guard against the incursions during sleep of haints, malevolent spiritual entities known to ride sleepers, drawing away breath, and the force of life. Blue feet and hands were also indicators of work on the enslavement industry of the early cash crop, Indigo, introduced into South Carolina as a means of economic opportunity for European colonists, predicated upon exploiting the know-how of indigenous Africans who were familiar with the ways of extracting the rich blue and violet colors from the indigo plant. In the sculpture, In Defence of an Offering (fig. 5), Brown offers an object which directs our attention toward consideration of an experience; the hopeful optimism, despite its torments, of Love. This beaded heart, glittering red, run through with tortured, rusted nails, assaulted by a callous bullet, and clinched in the grip of a piece of twisted, discarded, electrical wire, while impaled by an iron keya poignant, poetic image implying the psychological torment of the act of offering ones lovea sacrifice.to someone. Country Preacher (fig. 6) This image of skeletal carnivore (thought to be a foxs skull) biting into the structure of a church offers a metaphor for the institution of the country preacher a sometime predatory relation between spiritual leader and a flock of believers who support the preachers Cadillac and personal luxury by personal sacrifice. Alluding to the tension between sacred and secular concerns for the religious leader for whom his profession as a source

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of income may serve to conflict with his roles and responsibility for his flock. The idea of preying upon the praying, not necessarily suggesting doubts concerning the commitment of the minister to his own faith, but alluding to the challenges to integrity of a fox among the hens. The installations, photographs and images of this exhibition offer a critical evocation of the powerful connections we as human creatures must encounter between the realms of the visible and the realms of the invisible: we are confronted with the phenomenological world of perceptible things and the intelligible worlds of our intuitions, feelings and hopes. Our lives are enriched both by what we are capable of directly perceiving and by messages, transmissions, ideas, and an inheritance of invisibles; the known but unseen and unseeable - an inheritance of a cultural legacy replete with presences, which are sensed but yet may not be detectable. Michaela Pilar Browns ghostly paintings, surprising photographs, and compelling installation works form a nexus for the conversations in which we all must necessarily engage as a consequence of the character of being human and resulting from the nature of existence, that is, the nature of being Beings.

Member, The Association Internationale des Critiques dArt African Amercian Professors Program Doctoral Scholar The Department of Philosophy, University of South Carolina

Frank Martin

about the artist

Born in Bangor, Maine, Michaela Pilar Brown was raised in Denver, Colorado and currently resides in Columbia, South Carolina. She studied sculpture and art history at Howard University and was the Fall 2011 Harvey B. Gantt Artist in Residence at the McColl Center for Visual Art in Charlotte, North Carolina and a 2012 recipient of an Artist Grant from The Vermont Studio Center in Johnson, Vermont. Today Browns art practice focuses on cutlural hierarchies relating to beauty and how race and history play into these caste systems saying, I explore issues of identity and notions of otherness as defined in American standards of beauty using a combination of performance and staged photography...to create work that is at once confrontational and seductive.

Goodall Gallery
Spears Center for the Arts 1301 Columbia College Drive Columbia, SC 29203 803.786.3899 www.columbiasc.edu