Statements Booth M10
For Statements at Art Basel 2022, Nicelle Beauchene Gallery is pleased to share a solo presentation by Elliott Jerome Brown Jr. Expanding upon his recent exploration of the connections between architecture and photography, Brown will premiere a monumental sculpture alongside six new photographs, the formats of which are elongated and columnar. This is the artist's first solo presentation in Europe.
Using light and shadow as tools to obscure individuals or spaces, Brown makes photographs that foreground privacy, discretion, and interiority. Clarity and its obverse—be it uncertainty, shade, opacity—run hand in hand. Faces often remain out of frame, concealed by objects and architecture or simply cropped from the composition. As curator Katherine Adams observes, the artist explores "the image as a space of ellipsis, in which [a photograph's] affective and spatial intimacies exist on the threshold of the inexpressible."
In the suite of photographs premiering at Art Basel—most of which are spatial and non-figurative—the artist employs surfaces like glass and mirrors as actors within the image. The trace of bodies evidences itself as smudges or smears on or through both materials, with Brown engaging their reflective properties to produce echoes of an atmosphere beyond the frame of the camera.
The focal point of the presentation, an architectural intervention within the booth, takes shape in the form of a wall that itself supports artworks on both its exterior and interior. On its shortest edge, an opening reveals a series of tunnels and back-lit, black and white images. Within this sculptural gesture, Brown's interest lies in the intangible, incoherent, or imperceptible qualities of space—intervening upon and turning unfamiliar expectations of fundamental architectures.
Elliott Jerome Brown Jr. (b. 1993) lives and works in New York. He has had solo exhibitions at Nicelle Beauchene Gallery, New York (2022, 2019); Staple Goods, New Orleans (2019) and Baxter St. at the Camera Club of New York (2019). Recent group exhibitions include Swiss Institute, New York (2021); RISD Museum of Art, Providence (2021); The Arts Club of Chicago (2020); New Orleans Museum of Art, New Orleans (2020); Public Art Fund, New York (2020); The MAC, Belfast (2019); PPOW, New York (2019); Studio Museum in Harlem, New York (2018); Yossi Milo Gallery, New York (2018); Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art, New York (2018); We Buy Gold, New York (2018), among others.
His work can be found in the public collections of Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; New Orleans Museum of Art, Louisiana; and Harvard Art Museums, Massachusetts.