Delia Brown: Precious May 8 through June 21, 2008 Opening Reception: May 10, 6-8 PM
D’Amelio Terras is pleased to present Precious, new oil-on-panel paintings by gallery artist Delia Brown. Works on view present the latest in Brown’s continued, staged performances where she and her friends act out scenes of complicated desire. In this series, Brown casts herself and childless peers in the roles of mothers. This time around, she asks a bit more of her collaborators — to borrow perhaps their most prized possessions, their children.
The intimately detailed works are reminiscent of the 19th century scenes depicted by Mary Cassatt and Berthe Morisot. According to Brown, “The title, Precious, also refers to how attitudes about paintings are gendered. In painting school during the late 80s, one was told not to be ‘precious’, which was a way of saying that one must instead be bold, muscular, unattached, unsentimental – in a word, masculine.”
Precious shows the artist entering portraits of maternity, propping children on her hip or cozying up in rumpled sheets for story-time. Brown has created images by which she investigates maternity without the compromises of real motherhood, but perhaps too, without the rewards.
Brown has also offered cherubic stills of children alone, gazing back at the viewer amidst their snacks and toys. Stepping out of the frame, the artist captures 11-year-old girls, primping in the bathroom or leisurely playing with their puppies against fine fabrics and furnishings. The luminescent layers of paint recall the delicate decadence of the Rococo painters while the subject, girls apart from their mothers, idle their time in a Balthusian tension where innocence teeters on the cusp of naughtiness.
Delia Brown has exhibited widely throughout Europe and the United States. In 2007, Brown’s “Felicity & Caprice” opened at D’Amelio Terras, and “Guerrilla Lounging” showed at Baldwin Gallery in Aspen, Colorado, accompanied by a catalogue. In 2006, her first museum show at John Michael Kohler Arts Center, Sheboygan, WI focused on self-portraiture. In 2005, D’Amelio Terras organized “All Access Atelier” at Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin, Paris, France turning the gallery into a fully functional painting studio in which Brown painted from live models in constructed environments. Delia Brown received an MFA in painting from UCLA in 2000 and currently lives and works in New York.
Lisa Tan: Moving a Mountain May 8 through June 21, 2008 Opening reception: Saturday, May 10th, 6-8 PM
D’Amelio Terras is pleased to present “Moving a Mountain”, a Front Room exhibition by artist Lisa Tan. Works on display are a result of a trip Tan made from New York to Mexico City in November 2007. Tan’s fleeting journeys often provide an impetus for her work, which attempts to poetically encapsulate where desire and melancholia meet. This trip to Mexico City, coinciding with the Day of The Dead holiday, became a quiet discovery on what the artist found to be living.
Tan pays particular attention to the properties of midnight in a foreign city, a combination she believes to produce a ripe sense of dislocation and heightened observation. At midnight in Mexico City, while she overhears (and voyeuristically listens to) her hotel neighbors, Tan studies a painting of a mountain hung in her room and thinks of her own state of being. Taking detailed notes and photographs, but unable to discard the thought of the painting of the mountain, the artist concludes the journey months later when she returns to Mexico City to leave a trace of herself that will remain in the hotel room she once occupied.
Lisa Tan lives and works in New York City. She was born in Syracuse, NY and was raised in West Texas until she moved to Los Angeles for graduate studies. Tan received an MFA from the University of Southern California. Tan has had one-person exhibitions at Andreas Grimm Gallery in Munich in 2005 and 2007, and LA>
