How To Win The Lottery, Performance

Saturday, October 3 2009, Nuit Blanche, Contemporary Art Festival

First Canadian Place, Toronto Financial District

Curated by Jennifer Fischer and Jim Drobnick

New York-based artist, Melissa Brown’s performances experiment with mass media systems such as currency, the lottery, Business Reply Mail, stamps, crime posters and tourist postcards. How to Win the Lottery is an all-night lecture performance that will demonstrate a variety of scientific and intuitive techniques geared to winning the lottery. For a growing number of economically distressed citizens, the lottery is the last, best hope for financial security. This performance features the artist’s distinctive oratory, demonstrations and workshops geared towards generating – what else? — the elusive winning combo for Lotto 6/49! Special guest cameos will also weigh in on predictions.

Interview and Performance Clip on Nuit Blanche Site. (clip begins with Carla Edwards)

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Wild Feature / Wild Feature 2

Curated by Brian Belott

Zurcher Studio, New York, New York

June 25 - July 30 2009

Gallerie Zurcher, Paris, France

Six of One / Half Dozen of the Other, Print Installation, Woodcuts on Hand Dyed Paper

Dimensions Variable

Writing about Wild Feature

Paper Fortune

Solo Exhibition

Canada, New York, June 11- July 12 2009

PRESS RELEASE:

EXHIBITION PRESS RELEASE:
Canada is pleased to announce Paper Fortune a solo show by Melissa Brown. Ms. Brown is a printmaker who makes large-scale woodcuts with images collected from lottery Tickets, money, and supermarket tabloids.  Ms. Brown’s pieces are funny, punchy and curiously abstract, sharing the fringe visionary qualities of such  American artists as Alfred Jensen, Charles Burchfield and the creator of the Mad magazine fold-in Al Jaffe.
Each one of Ms. Brown’s images is unique; she paints a light under painting on sheet of paper and then prints on top, creating subtle shifts in palate and atmosphere. The wood plates she uses are often very large and need to be pressed outside with a stream roller (!), as conventional presses are not large enough.  The prints range from straight satirical images of dollar bills warning of the perils of corporate greed to multifaceted abstractions based on  attened out origami. The weird folded concoctions Ms. Brown chooses are often mysterious and apply to chance, fortune telling or multi-plane geometry. Two examples are the absurdly named hexa hexa  exagon, used by mathematicians to demonstrate the principle behind the Mobius strip or the more familiar cootie catcher, used to catch cooties and tell fortunes on playgrounds.
The result is multifaceted images that are giddily kaleidoscopic in feel, and completely stoned as strategy for creating abstraction.
Ms. Brown intensifies the pop-mysticism by using cartoony and loud lottery tickets as an image bank for her abstract mandalas. The colorful tickets are full of dizzyingly seductive symbols, o ering themselves up as magical gateways to fortune. There is a homely sense of power and optimism in the small act of choosing numbers, a loved ones birthday or a simple hunch, in the hopes of getting them right and the hitting the jackpot. It is the con uence of luck, yearning, randomness and a shared cultural experience that makes playing the lottery so appealing. Melissa brown celebrates the silliness, seriousness, mystery and ritual of this act. Homespun conviction and high-minded heuristics collide in Melissa Browns prints. She celebrates the human need to pick through the worldly maze of signs and symbols, the forces beyond our control, in hopes of outfoxing the universe, because as the New York lottery puts it: ‘Hey, you never know’.

Hexahexaflexagon, Woodcut on Hand Dyed Paper with Stencil, 192″ x 32 “, 2008

Writing about Paper Fortune

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Melissa Brown and Mat Brinkman

M + B Los Angeles, CA

January 31 - 4 Apr 2009

Curated by Dan Nadel

PRESS RELEASE:
M+B is pleased to present MELISSA BROWN & MAT BRINKMAN, a two-person show of new works on paper.  Friends and contemporaries, Brinkman and Brown both attended the Rhode Island School of Design in the mid-1990s. Both artists create iconic, unsettling images that comment and expand upon their popular visual culture roots.
Mat Brinkman, co-founder of Fort Thunder and the collective Force eld, creates drawings of monsters, creatures, and phantoms which double as portraits of the horrors of contemporary human nature. Drawing on creators like Gary Gygax and the visual languages of role-playing games and Death Metal, Brinkman has re-invented the once benign idea of “monster” for a new, much more sinister millennium.
Melissa Brown works within the serendipitous collisions between the visual language of lotto tickets and utopian architecture of the 1970s. Brown constructs elaborate geometries from discarded lotto tickets, creating images and new values. She notes, “When the collages are complete, I calculate the total face value of the included tickets. As an artwork, my goal is to double the money that was lost in the purchases of losing tickets.
The compositions are graphs of mathematical phenomena and ubiquitous natural geometry.”
For this show, both artists confront each other with structures and forms grounded in darkness
( nancial, psychological and mythical) but formed in the light of their restless re-invention of their
inherited cultures.

Grandmas’ Dream, $2485 in used scratch-off tickets, 28 ” x 28″, 2009

Run The Table, $798 in Used Scratch-Off Tickets, 2009

To view M + B Exhibition Site
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Badlands: New Horizons in Landscape

Curated by Denise Markonish

Badlands: New Horizons in Landscape
,
May 24, 2008 - April 12, 2009, 
Building 4, First Floor
From the earliest renderings on cave walls, man has been compelled to depict the world around him. The tradition of portraying the landscape has threaded together movements as varied as the mid-19th century Hudson River School and the Earth Art of the 1960s and ‘70s. Badlands: New Horizons in Landscape, opening Sunday, May 25, 2008, at MASS MoCA (Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art) in North Adams, opens the next chapter in the landscape tradition, addressing contemporary ideas of exploration, population of the wilderness, land usage, environmental politics and the relativity of aesthetic beauty.
Badlands comes at this critical time, an era when the world is more ecologically aware yet more desperately in need of solutions than ever before. The artists in this exhibition share this collective anxiety some turn to the past to see how their predecessors negotiated the terrain of the landscape while some propose entirely new ideas. While deeply aware of the legacy of the landscape, each of these artist reinvents the genre to produce works that look beyond vast beauty to address current environmental issues.

How disasters affect the land
:
Another group of artists addresses both natural and man-made disasters and how they affect the land and its inhabitants. Leila Daw’s large-scale paintings deal with floods and volcanoes and how they impact both the landscape and civilization; in her work the constructed environment is always being wiped out as a lesson to the interlopers. Melissa Brown and J. Henry Fair deal more directly with the beauty of a declining landscape. Brown’s Anime-inspired paintings look like postcard images of national parks until closer examination reveals an oil slick on the surface of the water or a technicolor view of Niagara Falls. Fair’s unaltered aerial photographs seem to capture beautiful abstractions of the landscape, while, in truth, their “beauty” is actually the result of man-made chemical processes that are actively polluting the landscape.

Pond Scum, Oil on Aluminum, 48″ x 48″, 2007

New Valdez, Oil on Aluminum, 60″ x 120″, 2008

Badlands Catalog, Published by MIT Press.

Writing about Badlands.

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System : System

Curated by Christina Vassallo and Adam Henry

October 22, 2009

St. Cecilia Convent, Brooklyn, New York