For the past five years I have had a studio in Bushwick. This Brooklyn neighborhood is a vibrant mix of residential dwellings and gritty factories. In recent years Bushwick has seen an influx of artists and immigrants. To outsiders the landscape may seem forbidding. Houses stand next to vacant lots filled with rubble. Shoes dangle from wires above the street in macabre clumps. Morning glories intertwine with barbed wire on the perimeter of junk yards. Graffiti and colorful street murals are everywhere.
This odd landscape possesses a simultaneous allure and menace that I take as the starting point for my paintings. I gather data from the lexicon of mundane images in my environment and reimagine them in dreamlike settings. Neighborhood staples such as satellite dishes, wire, and graffiti tags are juxtaposed with candy-colored skies, out-of-focus imagery, dark silhouettes, and painterly surfaces. The paintings represent my obsession with the neighborhood and an homage to the community from a recent transplant.
Deborah Brown
322 Stockholm Street
11237
New York, NY
Brooklyn, NY
New York
North America
