SMALL GALLERY

October 11 – November 9, 2024

States of Minds at Different Times
Colleen Brown

Reception + Artist Talk: Friday, October 11th at 5PM

My mother always gave her children a dime to put in the collection plate. Although there are twenty years between Vicky and me, this memory of Mom giving us the dime in the pew and helping us add our contribution to the plate is exactly the same. Laura, Mark, and Jim all remember their dimes.
“Did you ever think of stealing them?” Jim asks.
I didn’t but we both agree I would have if I’d been given more time.
(excerpt from If you lie down in a field, she will find you there)

In States of Minds at Different Times, Brown uses her base figure (the corporeal lump, the upright address, the beckoning display, and the scattered content) to consider individual expressions of cultural forces. Brown’s work is an inside look at how children born twenty years apart collectively remember their mother. It demonstrates how we construct stories about each other, focused on one of the most critical relationships in our lives, our relationship with our mothers.
In the visual artworks, Brown takes a very different approach to memory, focusing on the richness of texture and colour of some experiences seen in the rearview mirror of memory. She combines fabrics, objects and iconography of a child with those of an adult, as they are always mixed in places that house mothers and children.

Although Brown has been chasing after the influence of Protestantism on her mother’s and possibly all of our lives for this exhibition, what she has emerged with are thoughts about physical culture during the 50s-70s.

Known primarily as a sculptor, Colleen Brown explores the relationships of objects and materials to think through abstraction and social encounters. Brown holds a BFA from Emily Carr University, a BA Psyc, Simon Fraser University and an MFA from the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts, Bard College, New York. Her recent solo exhibitions include, If you lie down in a field, she will find you there, Ranger Station Gallery; That Mountain is a Good Listener, Burrard Foundation and Low Pressure Idaho, Unit 17. She has participated in exhibitions and events at the Morris and Helen Belkin Gallery, Vancouver; Living Lab, Emily Carr University; Cooper Cole, Toronto; Vancouver Art Gallery; Western Gallery, Bellingham; Hedreen Gallery, Seattle; and The Apartment, Vancouver. Colleen’s first book, If you lie down in a field, she will find you there was published in the Fall of 2023.