As scary as it would be for some people to stand up in front of 130 people and perform, it was that scary for me to show those colored pencil drawings. LB: I thought I was going to do one, but I realized I needed to take a break and give myself a chance to show drawings and sculptures. ** There was no performance associated with your recent solo show Immortal Duck. Lex Brown, ‘Then parting, smiling, and exiting,’ (2017) Courtesy the artist + Deli Gallery, New York. And, no one ever wants to talk about this, but I have to support my performance work. So it’s also nice to have this process of making something physically tangible. They can be read and experienced independently of performance, or interdependently between works.Īfter the experience of a performance has passed, you can sometimes feel like you’re left with nothing. The objects that I’m using now my are made as sculptures and serve as characters, objects, and places.
I got to a point where I was ready to build more of that complexity into the work. I have an acute sense of double-consciousness and often perceive myself as if from looking from the outside. I’ve always had a fascination in the body as an object that is embodied by a spirit, and also how others objectify a given body. As I got into performing, I focused less on the objects and more on language, sound, and sequence. I also made sculptures that had a performative relationship to language. LB: Before I started performing I was making installations based around characters. ** Could you speak to the relationship between your object-making and your performances? Courtesy the artist + Deli Gallery, New York. Lex Brown, ‘Wave Sandwich,’ (2017) Installation view. I wanted the whole show to have a relationship to the rhythm and look of cartoons. There is something so truthful to me about cartoons in the way that they portray an elasticity to reality. That Daffy Duck is the one with real power had a personal resonance for me. He can’t die because he’s needed – Fudd would have nothing more to shoot at.
#Elastic reality alternative series
The title of the show, Immortal Duck, references a series called ‘The Hunting Trilogy’ where Elmer Fudd shoots Daffy Duck 18 times within three episodes, but Daffy never dies. Those fast-paced fluctuations between highs and lows are a strategy that I use in my performances a lot – to go on a real up-and-down with the audience. He’s kind of manic and his emotions are always fluctuating wildly. More than any of the other Looney Tunes characters, Daffy embodies so many different personas and roles.
I realized that he, as a character, is such a clown, specifically a clown in the way that I have been studying clowning as a performance technique and tradition.
I’m feeling a sense of beginning again, so I was mining things from childhood and watching a lot of Daffy Duck videos. Lex Brown: My work is rooted in an appraisal of what energy I need to grow at any given time. Having studied clowning techniques, the artist’s searing performances similarly draw upon pop cultural and autobiographical references, while they employ musico-theatrical forms that run from operetta to RnB.īetween the close of Immortal Duck and the upcoming presentation of her new video ‘Lip Gloss Alurt’ on the Highline Channel opening on September 28, Brown spoke with AQNB about her work, and her relationship with cartoons which resonate in their portrayal of an elastic reality. While Immortal Duck owes its pacing to the energetic and linguistic elements present in her drawings, much of Brown’s previous work has accomplished this through in situ performance. Alongside a number of sculptural works that pull their power through the vernacular of the support structure, a pair of densely geometric colored pencil on paper drawings conceal the artist’s diaristic texts on a romantic encounter in Central Park, as well as women in Hollywood movies. Courtesy the artist + Deli Gallery, New York.īrown’s first solo exhibition Immortal Duck, which ran at New York’s Deli Gallery from June 9 to July 9, presented an unruly group of fluid ink-on-paper renderings of the classic Looney Tunes character Daffy Duck. Lex Brown Immortal Duck (2017) Installation view. Materially, her works encompass performance, sculpture, writing (her erotic novel M y W e t H o t D r o n e Su m m e r is available through Badlands Unlimited), video, and, most recently, drawing. “There’s an economy to emotional expression,” says Lex Brown, when speaking by phone of her desire to “de-internalize racism and sexism.” The New York-based artist’s fluency in expressive economies is evidenced in her artworks, which deftly balance a sense of comedy that is dark and vaudevillian with the strength of her subjectivity – a counterpoint on which the other elements turn.
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