Coady Brown: Super Natural
Exhibition Dates: March 3–April 21, 2019
Opening Reception: Sunday, March 3, 2019, 6–9pm
Coady Brown, After Dark, 2019, oil and mixed media on canvas, 54 x 46 inches
1969 Gallery presents Super Natural, a solo exhibition of new paintings by Coady Brown. In her depictions, Brown displays persons navigating new and uncertain terrains. Figures are caught in liminal spaces, moving between dichotomies: from public to private space, exterior to interior, discomfort to pleasure, and back again.
The title of the exhibition refers to a heightening of reality. There is a sense that other, unknown forces are at play. Bodies act as unwitting barometers, shaped by the company they keep, bending to both natural and artificial stimuli. In our contemporary moment, full of tension, anxiety, and exaggeration, it’s impossible not to feel the effects of this contentious climate, both psychologically and physically. Throughout the exhibition, Brown highlights the power of these external influences, orchestrating moments of seduction, dependence, or hesitation, as people slink down shadowy streets in “After Dark” or navigate intimate boundaries in bars and bedrooms.
Brown’s nocturnal scenes, fractured and reimagined by neon light, examine self-presentation in both private and public life. Figures, like those in “Persuasion” and “Raise Me Up”, become reflections of their environments, mirroring these surreal, frenetic, sexy, and sorrowful states. In their contrasting flatness and opticality, bodies resist a rigidity of perception and consumption. The figures are never nude: they are decidedly, specifically dressed. Patterns are hand-painted in contrasting, high-chroma colors, with fashion acting as a fissure; a split that can expose and explore the illogical, confused, animated, and divided self.
Coady Brown (b. 1990, Baltimore, MD) received her BFA from the Tyler School of Art at Temple University in 2012, and her MFA from Yale University in 2016. Brown is currently a 2018-2019 Fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, MA, and in 2017, completed a residency at the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture. Brown had her first solo exhibition at 1969 Gallery (Fool Me Twice) in 2018, and has also shown work in various group exhibitions at Mulherin Gallery, Koenig & Clinton, Abrons Art Center, and Tomorrow Gallery, all in New York, NY, as well as NAM Projects in Milan, Italy, the Provincetown Art Association and Museum in Provincetown, MA, among others. Her work has been written about in The New York Times, The Village Voice, and New American Painting.