Brice Brown

The art and evolution of puppetry has a long historical record dating back to 4,000 years. B. C. In India, it is written about in the Mahabharata.  In fact, “the Sanskrit terms sutradhara (he who holds the strings) and sutraprota (puppet), denote the earliest written accounts of puppetry in world literature.”  In early ritualistic ceremonies, puppets or inanimate figures were used as stand-ins or surrogates for humans and/or deities. 

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Writing on Brice Brown’s work for the accompanying catalogue, Alpesh Kantilal Patel states:

"Brice Brown’s works are queer. They are unstablesignifiers that exist in between here and there as well as now and then; and operate ona meta-level through the production of a palpable destabilizing affect. In the process, theseworks make felt the impossibility of the closure of identity, broadly construed."

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Brice Brown has blown apart the rigid scheme of the sestina, the elaborate and tricky verse form invented by the 12th-century French troubadour Arnaut Daniel, to juggle vestiges of symbols (a bird, a heart, a crown, a figure eight and such) so that they produce quirky visual rhythms. Hard-edge lines and shapes inflect softer, squigglier lines and free-form structures behind them, perceived at varying depths.

Painters who share a life as well as a studio, Brice Brown and Don Joint nevertheless have distinctly disparate abstract styles. Mr. Joint's is one of exuberant, high-key color laid down in hard-edge, geometric shapes, suggesting maybe the work of Patrick Henry Bruce. Mr. Brown's relates more to Abstract Expressionism and, say, de Kooning, with looser brushwork and a softer palette.

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