Stephanie Brown Solo: Breeding Season

November 12, 2016 - December 15, 2016


Title: Breeding Season

Using traditions in natural history illustration, this new body of work by Stephanie Brown explores the hierarchy of natural selection in both real and imagined scenes. These sacred animal rituals exist in our perceivable realm, often unseen - but when the curtain is peeled back, the subjects symbolically articulate human desire, anxiety and fear.

The luxuriant plumages and brilliant shows of color attract our eye, but also reveal the subjects in their most fertile, vulnerable and desperate state - revealing themselves to both partners and predators.  The undercurrent of survival drives the most reptilian processes in every organism - to consume and to propagate. The spaces where these processes intersect reveal the relationships in the larger ecosystem that frequently cross paths with complex human interest.

 

Artist Bio:

Stephanie Brown is a multidisciplinary artist, in both traditional mediums and the art of tattooing.  Graduate of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, she worked with the artist-in-residence at the Field Museum in Chicago - which gave an inside look to both natural history collections, and the applied arts surrounding them, both of which inspire the subjects and application of her work.