Coady Brown: Fool Me Twice

(+ I ❤ BLACK)

Exhibition Dates: November 10 – December 17, 2017     

Exhibition Opening: Friday, November 10 @ 6-8 PM

1969 is pleased to present new paintings by Coady Brown, completed during her recent summer residency in Maine at the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture and the University of Vermont in Burlington, Vermont, where Brown currently teaches.

These newest paintings capture the dynamic interplay of bodies overlapping and swirling in a color-filled context. There’s hardly any personal space, and no outdoors; bodies seem to become their surroundings. Ownerless hands droop everywhere, toe-and-finger nails are painted for whatever occasion brings these figures together; faces are shrunken and seem to have passed through a funhouse compact mirror.

Everyone belongs to the night, with darting eyes in an urban game of hide-and-peek. The exhibition reveals the artist’s flowing spirit, capacity for playful exchange, and her toggle between spontaneity and intent and the interior and atmosphere of a room.

Coady Brown paintings usually prompt visual tracing and retracing of the the arms and legs of the bodies which become flat sidewalks and swooshing pathways, and of the grids and geometric blocks, which contrast with the circularity of the scene. Each viewing experience becomes potentially new and the viewer is likely to get lost in her own chosen way. If you follow a warm yellow arm, you could be witnessing either an embrace or a pickpocket. The cyclist in Low Down in geometric patterned pants and encrusted shirt might nearly snuff out the two silhouettes in a moment of their intimacy down by her right knee. 

In these newest paintings, thievery and secrecy become metaphors for love. And though every personal relationship is partly unknowable from the outside, witnesses and bystanders always loom, shaping the intimacy itself. The artist may not be a humanist—she is likely still thinking about it. Meanwhile, she is concerned with paint, painting, and creating paintings that hold together dissonant, cacophonous scenes without cracking.

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Concurrently, 1969’s project space presents I ❤ Black, a group exhibition devoted to the art world’s favorite and slightly misunderstood color. Death is not black – it is more blue. Sex is not black – its Pantone strip title is molten flesh. Black is simply a mood and, like the weather, a strong determinant. Which might explain why it goes with just about everything.

Black paintings by William Bradley, Sarah Esme Harrison, Tom Levy, Tariku Shiferaw and Panos Tsagaris.