Scholars@Hallwalls: Becky Brown
Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center (341 Delaware Ave., Buffalo, NY 14202)
FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC
Join us for Scholars@Hallwalls! Complimentary wine and light fare are served for a brief, pre-talk mingling session.
4:00pm | Mingling
4:15pm | Introductions and featured talk followed by Q+A
We hope you'll join us in-person for the good camaraderie and conversation, but you can also livestream the event via the Hallwalls website.
Becky Brown
Enjoy Every Little Moment: Parenting, Technological Anxiety and the Human Touch
My talk will discuss the development of a 12-foot long painting in the model of a timeline, addressing experiences of parenting in this technological era. Unlike parents throughout history, we have an enormous quantity of online content at our fingertips, from YouTube breastfeeding videos, to first-hand accounts of birth traumas. I use data from my son’s life alongside text generated by this 24/7 information stream, including excerpts from social media, product recommendations and “new baby” greeting card messages (like “Enjoy Every Little Moment”). This project extends my recent work on technology, language and meaning.
Becky Brown is a painter and visual artist born and raised in Manhattan, currently living in Buffalo, NY. Her work uses hand-painted lettering, found text and irregular pattern to restore attention and a human touch in the face of advancing online culture. She received her BA from Brown University, her MFA from Hunter College and is an Assistant Professor at SUNY University at Buffalo.
Solo and two-person exhibitions include PS122 Gallery (NYC), Arts+Leisure Gallery (NYC), the Handwerker Gallery (Ithaca, NY), Raft of Sanity (Buffalo, NY) and Fort Gondo (St. Louis, MO). Group exhibitions include The Drawing Center, Queens Museum, Freight+Volume Gallery, Pratt Manhattan Gallery and A.I.R. Gallery (all NYC); Last Projects (Los Angeles); Buffalo Institute of Contemporary Art and Hallwalls (Buffalo, NY), CICA Museum (Gyeonggi-do, Korea) and Religare Arts Initiative (Delhi, India). She has been an artist-in-residence at MacDowell, Yaddo, Millay, Edward Albee and Saltonstall Foundations, among others. Her installation “No, said the Fruit Bowl,” in the kitchen of an abandoned home on Governors Island, was described in the New York Times as “machines vomiting as if in a bulimic’s nightmare.” She has received grant funding from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts and Bronx Council on the Arts. Her work has been written about in the New York Times, the New York Observer, Hyperallergic, Two Coats of Paint and Art Spiel, among others. Her critical writing has been published in Art in America and The Brooklyn Rail.
