Camille Brown
April
LAND is thrilled to present the first solo exhibition by New York-based artist Camille Brown. Camille’s photographs and prints represent a curiosity about the world of objects in a time defined by the peculiar daily oscillation between the actual and the virtual.
Camille’s practice is grounded in her search of and fascination with archival ephemera, printed matter, and vintage tools. For the project
Shelf Life (Ode to Grid), Camille happened-upon a copy of György Kepes’s celebrated 1966 volume The Man-Made Object from a box of deaccessioned books from the library at the San Francisco Art Institute. Language of Vision is a modern formal analysis of the effect of art, design, and visual culture on human consciousness. Attracted to the simple elegant form of the book, Camille carefully extracted all 41 pages of photographic reproductions, which she then used to create a suite of monoprints. Each print has a series of five half-inch black squares throughout the page. Camille rigorously manipulated the press between each print in order for the squares to never overlap or repeat – except for a single square in the center. In the end, between all of the prints, the entire surface of an 8x10 inch grid is theoretically covered in black.
For
Like a Rock, Like a River, Camille made an exhaustive series of self-portraits using a quad-lens vintage Polaroid Studio Express camera. Camille made an exposure while holding a card from a Color Aid color reference set, one at a time, until she photographed her way through the 100-piece set. Her upright stoic half-profile pose acknowledges the utilitarian practicality of the Color Aid, though the differences between the attempts at photographing herself in the same exact pose dozens of times becomes prevalent and re-asserts the significance of the physical stress and the labor of attempt.
Through repetitive durational processes, Camille’s work reflects on both the labor of the creative act as a straightforward, sometimes mechanical gesture, and the romantic beauty in the unique ability of the artist as individual.
Camille Brown (b. 1992) is a conceptual artist, curator and archivist living and working in New York City. Her work has been exhibited at the San Francisco Mint, Swell, Badlands, London Berlin Art Kunst, and others. She was formerly Photographer and Collections Associate at Letterform Archive and is currently Image Archivist at David Zwirner. Camille received her MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2017 and her BFA from Syracuse University in 2014.
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The exhibition runs April 1 through April 30, 2019 with an opening reception on Saturday April 6, 7:00-10:00 PM