Lex Brown ’12 is Instructing the Worth of a Multimedia Method to A…
Linette and Kyle Kielinski
The follow of switching between supplies and media is central to artist Lex Brown ’12’s work. It started at Princeton, the place Brown first studied artwork and archeology as an undergrad and now teaches as a lecturer in visible arts. Her artwork is sort of a collage of media: drawing, sculpture, poetry, video, dance, efficiency artwork, and textual content.
“For my thesis, I made 4 movies, I had sculpture, I did a 33-by-19-foot portray that was simply my fingerprints,” says Brown. “I made a guide, I did a efficiency, there was pictures. So there was lots there. And that has remained fairly constant — utilizing completely different media.”
This method has taken her far. After graduating, she earned an M.F.A from Yale’s sculpture program. In 2015, Badlands Limitless revealed her sci-fi erotic novella about surveillance and social justice. Final 12 months, she debuted sound sculptures and a brief movie known as “Communication” on the Deli Gallery in New York Metropolis; The New York Occasions known as it “humorous, absurd, and meditative.” Brown additionally hosts a podcast and lately designed a hand-bound guide known as Consciousness — a survey of her work spanning the previous eight years.
She’s carried out and exhibited on the New Museum, the Excessive Line, the Worldwide Heart of Pictures, Recess, The Kitchen, REDCAT Theater, the Hammer Museum, the Baltimore Museum, the Buffalo Institute for Modern Artwork, and the Munch Museum in Oslo. In 2021, she was named a USA Fellow by the USA Artists Group and gained a $50,000 award. Come April 2023, Brown will exhibit work in a solo present on the MIT Record Heart, curated by Selby Nimrod.
Instructing is a more recent follow for Brown. In 2020, she co-taught a junior seminar at Princeton and have become a Media Fellow at Harvard College. Instructing has challenged her to select aside her personal habits and practices as an artist as she guides college students by studio courses at Harvard corresponding to “Enter the Mediaverse.” At present, she is working with Princeton college students within the PICASSO Membership, a pupil service group centered on the intersection of artwork and activism, on a figurative mural venture that can be put in within the basement of Bloomberg Corridor.
Brown has lengthy been occupied with utilizing artwork and efficiency to discover themes of expertise, historical past, and religious resilience. “I’m within the basic anxiousness of expertise, the final oppression — the massive blobby type of it,” she says. “The way in which that takes form is thru very satirical narratives.”
Take “Communication,” Brown’s 30-minute quick movie wherein she performs 9 characters. The plot is centered round a fictional media empire known as Omnesia (a mix of “Omni” and “amnesia”) with “large management over the lives of extraordinary individuals.” Protagonist Aspen Van Der Baas and her “tech bro” pal Jordie use a man-made intelligence bot named Silvy to coerce individuals out of their neighborhoods to construct a brand new skyline. The movie explores how people are molded by algorithms and computational selections — selections Brown says are “designed to maximise revenue for companies on the expense of our psychological well being and bodily well being.”
“What if we devoted as many sources to advancing emotional intelligence?” Brown says. “Why wouldn’t we would like each individual to be as wholesome as doable in order that we are able to really make techniques rooted in steadiness, quite than looking for it in growing quantities of plastic and junk. We’re actually killing the planet due to unmet emotional wants.”
Brown hopes to proceed to instill this multimedia method in her Princeton college students. Within the fall she’ll be educating a drawing class.
“A multimedia method helps the power for an viewers to hook up with a few of these extra conceptual concepts,” Brown says. “Individuals connect with feelings and concepts in another way. By utilizing completely different media, I’m in a position to attain anyone by a sense, after which thought can coexist with that feeling. I believe that’s when artwork is actually memorable.”