Deli Gallery is happy to current Come Again As A Flower, a solo exhibition of recent work and works on paper by Brianna Rose Brooks, marking the artist’s second solo presentation with the gallery.
Brianna Rose Brooks paints from private reminiscence and fantasy to depict amalgamated moments from childhood, teenage years, and up to date maturity. The artist explores the views of plenty of totally different story tellers starting from childlike to mad, to caricatural to problem conceptions of those topics as unreliable narrators. This new physique of labor captures photos from the artist’s recollection, the work serving as souvenirs and portals into the previous to discover recollections earlier than they modify form once more. Have you ever ever revisited a reminiscence so many occasions you could barely keep in mind it in any respect? Brooks’s work goals to take pause with fleeting recollections maybe to uncover particulars misplaced to time, moderately than looking for to revive them to former glory.
In Go Mad With out Shedding Your Thoughts: Insanity and Black Radical Creativity, a ebook the artist was studying all through the method of making this newest physique of labor, La Marr Jurelle Bruce writes, “Reminiscence is usually thoughts’s middleman between proper now and again then, a mnemonic bridge or automobile that grants cognitive entry from the current to the previous. [for some.. The past] doesn’t require a mnemonic bridge for entry as a result of it’s at all times already right here, urgent “onerous” weighing closely, bypassing the mediation of reminiscence and impacting with the identical power and immediacy as [the] current”.
Some work borrow from the artist’s personal recollections, however not all. The central determine in Perennial Portray, 2024, wears a nameplate that reads “Brianna”, and anxiously rips tulips from a backyard mattress. Although the artist leads the viewer to imagine within the self portrait, the scene depicted will not be a private expertise. The artist makes use of their very own likeness as a complement inside a reminiscence skilled initially as witness. Their embodiment of this gesture is an avenue to discover the recollection in a mirrored image pool of their very own making, fusing time to comb by its opacity.
These new works construct upon the previous by together with earlier motifs from the artist’s oeuvre to additional develop the world round recurring symbols and mediums of their apply. In Appointment, 2024, the central determine takes a smoke break outdoors of a braiding salon. They’re midway by getting their hair braided. Behind them are blue monochrome photos of the salon’s number of coiffure choices. Brooks calls these hair fashions Patron Saints in an earlier silkscreen from 2017. For the artist, these hair fashions, that are recurring and normal components inside braiding salon storefronts, give rise to an iconography that requires veneration and eventual embodiment by coiffure. Appointment seizes and slows a second in the course of the means of transformation.
Along with 4 new work, the exhibition additionally options a number of works on paper and collage works. The collage works operate symbolically as manifestations of time journey. Sleepy Time Traveler, 2024, accommodates paper ephemera collected by the artist over time. Layered momentos carried all through the years throughout time and place, every charged with historic and nostalgic significance. For these collages, the artist has designed metallic frames to echo the poetics of vernacular structure seen in Appointment. The deal with design is referential to metallic gates discovered all through the a number of cities the artist has lived in throughout years. The objects clinging to every metallic body have histories and personal lives past the viewer’s grasp. These autonomous objects assembled– as soon as purposeful keys, mp3 gamers, souvenirs bought by family members and gifted to the artist– are relics of individuals and locations converging to symbolize the passage of time. Their scratches and indicators of use replicate a journey– each theirs, and the artist’s.