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Carol K. Brown at Nohra Haime
Art in America, May, 2004 by Michael Amy
As she declares in the press release for her exhibition of Lambda prints and a video at Nohra Haime, Carol K. Brown is ambivalent about the use of new technologies to create art. In her opinion, technology reduces the physical labor required to produce objects, thereby eradicating the hand of the artist and leading to images short on humanity. Nevertheless, drawn by the range of possibilities offered by new technologies, she decided to steer away from the abstract sculpture for which she is known and use a computer to manipulate her hand-painted images. The results leave something to be desired.
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To produce the 10 medium-size (26 by 38 inches or 27 by 20 inches) digital prints on display, Brown photographed her daughter dancing with a boyfriend at a wedding. Once the photographs were digitally manipulated, the artist translated them by hand into paintings on paper. They were then scanned back into the computer, digitally redrawn and printed out.
The most successful among them is Edgewater Ballroom #14, in which the dancing couple, recorded in a wide variety of poses, is multiplied as an endless crowd. Seen from above and at a distance, they fill the entire sheet. The woman wears a long red dress, low-cut in the back; the man a white shirt, red tie and black pants. Edgewater Ballroom #14 offers us a symphony of discrete, illusionistically rendered forms and localized areas of color that diminish in size toward the top of the composition. The repetition brings to mind Arman's "Accumulations."
While these works are most satisfying when perceived as if they are abstractions, they feel like little more than reproductions, and one misses the materiality of the paint that once constituted them. It is also difficult to care for Brown's protagonists, as, in their endless multiplication and repetition, they feel dispensable. Adding to this estrangement, Brown has removed their facial features.
In the video-projected on the end wall of the gallery and accompanied by a soundtrack of one-minute segments of classical music, klezmer and a tune by the girl group the Go-Go's--Brown rearranges and animates her computer-modified stills so as to create an illusion of choppy movement, as one couple and then others exit through a diminishing crowd of look-alikes, until the dance floor is nearly emptied. They then refill the scene, and the action is repeated.
A more successful body of work was shown in the adjacent room. There, one could see small, elegant acrylic drawings on paper (5 by 7 inches, all 2003) that were based on photographs Brown had taken of friends and strangers. Tiny figures, sometimes the same one multiplied, are situated within a blank white field, both ground and support, and cast long shadows across it. With these precisely drawn, faceless figures, isolated at different moments in different poses, Brown seems to allude to the futility of human (inter)actions.
--Michael Amy
COPYRIGHT 2004 Brant Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group
