Exhibition
Location
Bibliowicz Family Gallery
Milstein Hall
M–F, 8 a.m.–4:30 p.m.
Contact
Exhibitions and Events
Reception
TBD
Related Links
Abstract
A lay of a land surveys a contemplative landscape. As a point of orientation and point of departure, one might consider Victor Hugo Green’s Green Book. This contemplative landscape grapples with a common presumed feat of photography, depictions of truth and fact. This lay of a land is evidence of how plantations no longer harvest cash crops from free labor but consumables from cheap labor; how the implications of colonialism is so deeply embedded in our social landscape that it simultaneously becomes an empty, loaded signifier; how a city can have no body but a soul; or the possibility of places where money can, in fact, “grow” on trees.
The exhibition consists of works on paper rendered through various modes of translation including drawings, archival pigment prints, cyanotypes and gelatin silver prints. Having traveled, lived and observed, experience provides instruction on how to read a lay of a land. Through similarity and contrast, one starts to see where things are the same or different, both, geographically and historically, and learns where to go, or where not to go, not through explicit instruction, but through a visceral recognition of semiotics, signifiers and history.
Biography
Mark Anthony Brown Jr.
Mark Anthony Brown Jr. (b. 1991) is a journeyman. He currently lives and works between Cincinnati, Ohio, Durham, North Carolina, and Atlanta, Georgia. Mark has received a Bachelor of Science Technology from Bowling Green State University and a Master of Fine Art in Studio Art from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where he was a fellow in Museum Practice at The Ackland Art Museum.
Mark’s art practice is research driven and interdisciplinary; utilizing photography, printmaking, sculpture, drawing and painting with interests in vernacular aesthetic practices & sensibilities, the manifestation of African cultural retentions in the diaspora, and critical engagements with the landscape. In conjunction with his art practice, Mark is also an archivist & educator.
His work has been exhibited nationally; including the Cincinnati Art Museum and The Contemporary Art Museum in Raleigh, North Carolina. Mark has received various fellowships and awards including an Emerging Lens Fellowship from ArtWORKS in Chicago, the Nexus Grant from Atlanta Contemporary, The Majorie Bond Rare Book Fellowship at Wilson Special Collection Library at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a residency at Shandaken: Storm King.
Currently, Mark is the Strauch Early Career Fellow in Art at Cornell AAP.
