judith brassard brown
Membership Info
- Last Name
- Brown
- First Name
- Judith Brassard
- Website
- http://www.judithbrassardbrown.com
- Check this box to request a gallery space on the DAC website.
- Media
- Oil and mixed media paintings; and digital prints.
- Statement
My newest work responds to the insecurity and crisis now consuming us worldwide. I see this crisis centering on conflicts between powers over land and resources, as one that continues the religious conflicts of the crusades, between the great religions, between east and west, between those conquering and those conquered.
Each work is a verse of a large body of work which references the Urdu poetry form, the ghazal. "The ghazal prides itself, among other things, on the detachability and completeness of its individual verses, which retain their sense and effectiveness even when divorced from their context in the poem. The verses are not bound by the law of unity and consistency. The poet of the ghazal is at liberty to talk about love in the first verse, death in the second, envy in the third, mysticism in the fourth, and so on." This quote is excerpted from Masterpieces of Urdu Nazm by K.C. Kanda). I have adapted this literary form for my images. Each couplet is part of a larger whole and contributes to an eccentric timeline where people and places are connected by their humanity and not separated by culture, time or place. Gestures are universal as is our desire to live fully; there is no "us" and "them", only the intense moments we all share: of beauty, surprise, simple desires of love, family, or the suffering of ordinary people caught in the power struggles of a particular time.
For me, assembling and working the initially unrelated elements of each work is akin to connecting the disparate elements in dreams -- one of the ways we process our objective or waking experiences. Identifying and assembling the visual elements are critical steps in a long process of bringing order out of chaos, in developing images that respond with a full range of emotions to our experience in, and of, the world.
In my work I continue to look for the poetic and work to avoid the narrative. My intention is to honor memory by using it as shape and texture along with other shapes and textures. I see memory as inspiring the making of my work as well as well as playing a significant role in informing the development of each piece in particular; it provides the expressive subtext underlying the formal orchestration.
The photographs used in these paintings, mixed media and digital works are often of the "hold still" or posed variety; these are used with found or saved materials, with random images often through scanning and manipulating with the computer. In de-contextualizing the materials and combining them with other elements and materials, I create subjective realities based on personal memories that, hopefully, speak to our common concerns.
Images
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